[DG: Teaching & Learning] Fwd: UIEtips: Three Important Benefits of Personas

[Daphne Ogle]

Thought this brief summarization of why personas have been valuable to  
design teams might be of interest to some of you since we've been  
talking a lot about them lately.  You have to scroll down a bit to get  
the meat but for those of you who don't want to miss anything, the  
letter to the editor intro is also pretty good :).

Enjoy...

-Daphne


Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Jared M. Spool" <jared.m.spool at uie.com>
> Date: July 27, 2010 7:28:36 AM PDT
> To: daphne at media.berkeley.edu
> Subject: UIEtips: Three Important Benefits of Personas
> Reply-To: jared.m.spool at uie.com
>
>
> 	Three Important Benefits
> of Personas
> July, 27 2010
>
> Contents
>
> Letter from the Editor
> Round 3 of the iPad Drawing—You Could Be the Winner
> Feature Article: Three Important Benefits of Personas
> Storytelling for UX, an August 5 UIE Virtual Seminar
>
> Letter from the Editor
>
> Greetings,
>
> As part of our research to understand what techniques truly help  
> teams produce better designs, we're still constantly surprised by  
> the number of teams successfully using personas. With personas,  
> teams report that they are producing more usable designs that better  
> match the needs of their audience, increasing the satisfaction of  
> their users.
>
> When teams use personas well, every member of the team really does  
> seem to be on the same page about who the users are and what design  
> will work best for them. We haven't seen any other technique come  
> close to getting this kind of result.
>
> Our research has surfaced obvious benefits from the technique, such  
> as better designer agreement on important features and an in-depth  
> understanding of the user's motivations. But it's also unveiled some  
> benefits that we still don't see discussed very much. Today's  
> UIEtips focuses on a past article we're republishing, Three  
> Important Benefits of Personas. In the article, I discuss some of  
> these unrecognized benefits.
>
> A section of this article discusses the age-old tradition of  
> storytelling and how it ties in to learning and creating personas.  
> Our next UIE Virtual Seminar with Whitney Quesenbery is all about  
> storytelling. Whitney will teach you how to craft and tell your own  
> unique stories to improve your designs. Learn more about  
> Storytelling for UX.
>
> And if you want a deep dive into creating and using personas, you'll  
> definitely want to attend this year's User Interface Conference on  
> November 8-10 in Boston. Both Kim Goodwin and Tamara Adlin's full- 
> day workshop incorporate persona development and use to enhance your  
> designs.
>
> As always, please share your thoughts with us. Has your design team  
> created personas? What benefits have you seen? Join the discussion  
> about this week's topic at the UIE Brain Sparks blog.
>
> Enjoy today's article,
>
> Jared M. Spool
> Editor, UIEtips
>
>
> Round 3 of the iPad Drawing—You Could Be the Winner
>
> "Holy Cow! Are you serious? I can't believe I won it! My work  
> colleague is extremely jealous!"
>
> Those are the exact words from Donna Krainert when we told her she  
> is the newest member of the UI15 Apple iPad club. She and Jennifer  
> Cooper, winner from week 1, can now take copious notes at UI15 with  
> one of these babies.
>
> Interested in getting your own iPad? It's easy.
>
> Register for theUser Interface 15 Conference, taking place November  
> 8-10 in Boston, by July 29, and you'll be entered into the next  
> drawing. And if you're not the lucky winner for this drawing, we'll  
> automatically include you for the next drawing. See how you can be  
> the next winner.
>
> Why You Should Register Now for UI15
>
> We are so jazzed about this year's conference. The conversations  
> we've had with the presenters about their workshops are mind  
> blowing. Trust us when we say, this really is out best User  
> Interface conference yet.
>
> Here's just a sample of what some of the workshops will cover:
>
> Tools to help support the importance of personas with your executives
> Steps to demystify how design, UX, and SEO all work together
> Methods to cut your overall product development time in half
> Policies and standard guidelines to judge content requests and quality
> Save your seat now. The response to UI15 is strong. We're already at  
> our initial projections and this conference may sell out.
>
> If you register by July 29, you're getting the best deal. Not only  
> will you get the lowest conference rate of $1295—over $1000 savings  
> from the walk in price, you'll also be entered for two chances to  
> win an Apple iPad. Plus you're guaranteed to get your top choices  
> for the Monday and Wednesday workshops.
>
> So what are you waiting for? Sign-up today.
>
>
> Three Important Benefits of Personas
>
> 	
> Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering
>
> This article was originally published in May, 2007
>
> Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for  
> the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing  
> everyone else does: find themselves on the map.
>
> It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their  
> neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find  
> something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or  
> their favorite roller coaster.
>
> Psychologists call this "grounding," the natural behavior of  
> initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information  
> space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use  
> the starting point to understand the rest of the space.
>
> While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be  
> detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while  
> conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the  
> design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only  
> they can use.
>
> Separating You from Your Work
>
> Creating an interface for yourself is great if you're going to be  
> the only user. When we decide how we'll arrange our kitchen cabinets 
> — where the plates, glasses, pots, and pans will go— we want to put  
> ourselves into the design. But, we don't expect other people to  
> wander into our kitchen and start grabbing things without help.
>
> When we're creating online interfaces, it's a whole different story.  
> Here we're designing for others, not for ourselves. We may know too  
> much about the layout and structure. We'll understand the  
> relationships between various design elements ("That button is only  
> used with this dropdown"). We are very familiar with the jargon and  
> business rules.
>
> Therefore, when a designer grounds themselves in their own design,  
> they run the risk of designing an interface that only they can use.  
> Any tools that help designers prevent the natural behavior of  
> grounding helps them attack the design more objectively, with their  
> target user in mind.
>
> Benefit #1: Preventing Grounding with Personas
>
> We recently had the opportunity to talk with several design teams  
> currently using personas to help create their designs. We  
> discovered, while studying how they integrated their personas into  
> their design work, one major benefit was to prevent grounding.
>
> Personas are model users that the team creates to help understand  
> the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people who will use the  
> interface. The persona represents behavior patterns, helping the  
> designer understand the flow of the user's day and how the interface  
> will fit into it.
>
> The teams we interviewed used personas as a way to avoid the  
> grounding problem. Instead of asking, "How would I use this system?"  
> they asked, "How would Mary use the system?" They found their  
> persona's (Mary) initial reference point instead of their own,  
> making judgments about the design from the persona's point of view.
>
> Understanding Retirement
>
> One team in our study was working on an investment tool, primarily  
> used by retirees. The team, who consisted of primarily 20- 
> somethings, naturally assumed that, when they retire, they would  
> have simple investment and financial needs. As a result, they  
> created the initial design for simple transactions.
>
> Their subsequent field research produced a persona named Ron, an  
> active 76-year-old who had nine sources of income, three mortgages,  
> and needed to write 21 checks every month from his multiple  
> accounts. In the field, the team had seen many people similar to Ron  
> and their transactions were anything but simple.
>
> As soon as the team looked at their design from Ron's perspective,  
> they realized that their simple transaction approach was going to  
> complicate his life immensely. Putting Ron into the design, instead  
> of themselves, made them realize that they needed to take a  
> different approach. It turns out that preventing grounding wasn't  
> the only major benefit of personas we discovered during our  
> research. Two others jumped out at us as well.
>
> Benefit #2: The Oral Tradition Lives On
>
> As we studied teams who made substantial use of personas, we noticed  
> that the personas were talked about frequently, almost in mythical  
> terms. The team members had made up lives for these people, usually  
> based on the actual observations they made when they studied real  
> users. They constantly used these imaginary lives to relate  
> important stories about how these users would interact with the  
> proposed designs.
>
> Storytelling is an age-old tradition. Long before the written word,  
> humans have used stories to teach their children values and prepare  
> people for the world ahead.
>
> This tradition hasn't gone away. A few years ago, Xerox Corporation  
> set about studying how field repair technicians learned to  
> effectively deal with infrequent, yet complex problems.
>
> The researchers originally assumed that it was a mix of training and  
> mentoring that played the biggest role. They were shocked to  
> discover that those technicians who were best prepared for the  
> craziest problems didn't learn how to solve them in a classroom or  
> by tagging along with a more senior technician.
>
> Instead, they learned that the war stories exchanged when the  
> technicians got together were the biggest contributors to their  
> education. In these informal get-togethers, technicians would brag  
> about their accomplishments and try to shock their peers with  
> stories of woe and wonder. It was in the details of the stories that  
> the field technicians attributed their best education.
>
> Communicating Details in a Meaningful Way
>
> The teams we researched did the same thing. They got together and  
> told stories about how their personas would tackle some problem. In  
> the details of these stories, team members would start to get a real  
> sense of who these users were and the problems they might encounter.
>
> Using just the oral tradition, the stories become distorted with  
> every new telling. Many of the teams prevented this distortion by  
> capturing the stories along with the persona descriptions. (One team  
> went so far as to create a screensaver that would randomly display  
> the pictures, backgrounds, and stories of each persona on the  
> development team's machines when they were idle.)
>
> Benefit #3: The Role Personas Play in Role Playing
>
> Along with preventing grounding and encouraging story telling, we  
> found personas had a third benefit to the teams we studied:  
> enhancing role playing.
>
> From an early age, we use role playing as a way to safely explore  
> the world around us. By pretending to be different people, we can  
> try things out from their perspective, seeing if their viewpoint is  
> different from our own.
>
> Role playing has long been a part of design processes. For example,  
> in the 80's, designers at Apple used comic strips and play acting to  
> think through the lives of their users and how they would integrate  
> a variety of products, real and imaginary, into those users' lives.
>
> One design team we studied, who was in charge of a major electronic  
> retailer's e-commerce site, had an analyst role play each of four  
> personas, walking through the site as each character. For example,  
> one persona was a mom who wanted to buy educational software and  
> technology for her children. She wasn't a technical wiz, but wasn't  
> completely ignorant of the technology either.
>
> The analyst adopted her role to play the shopper on the site. From  
> that perspective, the analyst identified several issues with the  
> design of the site that hadn't been discussed previously. As the  
> analyst adopted the other three personas, different issues surfaced.  
> (Interestingly, we were independently doing a usability study on the  
> site simultaneously and discovered many of the same issues as the  
> analyst found from the four personas.)
>
> When we adopt a role, we can start to view the world around us from  
> that person's perspective. Using the persona as the target role, we  
> can identify how that person will interact with the design and the  
> issues that will arise. We start to see things we can't see any  
> other way.
>
> Taking Full Advantage
>
> Personas don't automatically get the benefits of preventing  
> grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing.  
> They have to be carefully crafted to get those benefits.
>
> To get the benefits, the personas have to have rich, relevant  
> detail. They need to accurately represent the users the team is  
> aiming for. And they need to have a solid foundation in the  
> experiences of real users to be believable and meaningful.
>
> Our research into the usage of personas has taught us that the most  
> successful teams are those that are constantly feeding their persona  
> information. They conduct frequent field studies to understand who  
> the users are and what goals and motivations they have. The teams  
> regularly use usability testing to expand their knowledge of their  
> users. They think of their persona documents as living descriptions  
> — constantly changing as they learn new things from their ongoing  
> research, studies, and design exercises.
>
> Personas are becoming a regular staple in many of the development  
> teams we talk to. The method helps teams make a smooth transition  
> between requirements and design, resulting in much cleaner designs.  
> The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and  
> enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when  
> you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our  
> belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come.
>
> • • •
>
> Jared's article is also available online.
>
> • • •
>
> If you find this article interesting, you'll definitely want to  
> investigate Kim Goodwin and Tamara Adlin's full-day workshops at  
> this year's User Interface Conference in Boston on November 8-10.  
> And if you register for the conference by July 29, you'll get 2  
> chances to win an Apple iPad.
>
> And if you want to bone-up on your storytelling skills you should  
> attend our next UIE Virtual Seminar with Whitney Quesenbery on  
> Thursday August 5. Whitney will teach you how to craft and tell your  
> own unique stories to improve your designs. Learn more about it.
>
> • • •
>
> Has your design team created personas? What benefits have you seen?  
> Join the discussion about this week's topic on UIE's Brain Sparks  
> blog.
>
>
> Storytelling for UX, an August 5 UIE Virtual Seminar
>
> Our next UIE Virtual Seminar, Storytelling for UX with Whitney  
> Quesenbery, is happening Thursday, August 5, 2010.
>
> We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire.  
> In user experience, stories help us better understand our users,  
> learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our  
> design ideas. Basing stories on fact (data or knowledge embedded in  
> your organization, or even new information) will help you  
> communicate your own ideas effectively. Tell your story well: you'll  
> get buy-in for the design and you'll have everyone on the same page.
>
> The Details
>
> WHAT: Storytelling for UX
> WHO: Whitney Quesenbery
> WHEN: Thursday, August 5, 1:30pm ET (90 minutes)
> WHERE: Online webinar
> COST: $129 per connection (pile everyone into a conference room!)
> WEB SITE: http://www.uie.com/events/virtual_seminars/storytelling/
>
> Whitney Quesenbery, user experience expert and master storyteller,  
> will teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to  
> improve your designs. Register or learn more details.
>
>
> Get regular updates about UIE when you follow us on Twitter or  
> become a fan on Facebook.
>
>
> Do you have feedback or comments on our article? Send us your  
> thoughts on our blog.
>
>
> Forward email
>
>
> This email was sent to daphne at media.berkeley.edu by jared.m.spool at uie.com 
> .
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Daphne Ogle
Senior Interaction Designer
University of California, Berkeley
Educational Technology Services
daphne at media.berkeley.edu
cell (925)348-4372




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