137:
represent these customer segments or communities followed. Jenkinson's approach was to describe an imaginal character in their real interface, behavior and attitudes with the brand, and the idea was initially realized with
Michael Jacobs in a series of studies. In 1997 the Ogilvy global knowledge management system, Truffles, described the concept as follows: "Each strong brand has a tribe of people who share affinity with the brand’s values. This universe typically divides into a number of different communities within which there are the same or very similar buying behaviours, and whose personality and characteristics towards the brand (product or service) can be understood in terms of common values, attitudes and assumptions. CustomerPrints are descriptions that capture the living essence of these distinct groups of customers."
149:. Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Such inference may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and features definition. Pruitt and Adlin argue personas are easy to communicate to engineering teams and thus allow engineers, developers, and others to absorb customer data in a palatable format. They present several examples of personas used for purposes of communication in various development projects.
22:
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as having produced designs with better usability attributes than students who did not use personas. The study also suggests that using personas may improve communication between design teams and facilitate user-focused design discussion. The study had several limitations: outcomes were assessed by a professor and students who were not blind to the hypothesis, students were assigned to groups in a non-random fashion, the findings were not replicated, and other contributing factors or expectation effects (e.g., the
157:
mental models on the product design which may be very different from that of the target user population. Personas also provide a reality check by helping designers keep the focus of the design on cases that are most likely to be encountered for the target users and not on edge cases which usually will not happen for the target population. According to Cooper, edge cases which should naturally be handled properly should not become the design focus.
291:. These methods generally take numerical input data, reduce its dimensionality, and output higher level abstractions (e.g., clusters, components, factors) that describe the patterns in the data. These patterns are typically interpreted as "skeletal" personas, and enriched with personified information (e.g., name, portrait picture). Quantitative personas can also be enriched with qualitative insights to generate mixed method personas (also called
226:
continuously reduced and abstracted until it is nothing more than a stereotype. Critics claim that persona creation puts the onus on designers, marketers, and user researchers to capture multiple peoples' opinions and views into predefined segments, which could introduce personal bias into the interpretation.
246:
in the use of personas. In a partially controlled study, a group of students were asked to solve a design brief; two groups used personas while one group did not. The students who used personas were awarded higher course evaluations than the group who did not. Students who used personas were assessed
136:
The concept of understanding customer segments as communities with coherent identity was developed in 1993-4 by Angus
Jenkinson and internationally adopted by OgilvyOne with clients using the name CustomerPrints as "day-in-the-life archetype descriptions". Creating imaginal or fictional characters to
105:. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews or surveys with users. They are captured in short page descriptions that include behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. In addition to
156:
may define the 'user' according to their convenience. Defining personas helps the team have a shared understanding of the real users in terms of their goals, capabilities, and contexts. Personas help prevent "self-referential design" when the designer or developer may unconsciously project their own
57:
is a personalized fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way. Personas represent the similarities of consumer groups or segments. They are based on demographic and behavioural personal information collected from users, qualitative
128:
Beginning in 1983, he started using a prototype of what the persona would become using data from informal interviews with seven to eight users. From 1995, he became engaged with how a specific rather than generalized user would use and interface with the software. The technique was popularized for
221:
In terms of scientific logic, it has been argued that because personas are fictional, they have no clear relationship to real customer data and therefore cannot be considered scientific. Chapman and Milham described the purported flaws in considering personas as a scientific research method. They
238:
In empirical results, the research to date has offered soft metrics for the success of personas, such as anecdotal feedback from stakeholders. Rönkkö has described how team politics and other organizational issues led to limitations of the personas method in one set of projects. Chapman, Love,
229:
Additionally, personas often feature gendered and racial depictions, which some argue is unnecessary and distracts the target audience of the personas from true consumer behaviors and only enhances biased viewpoints. Finally, it is worth acknowledging that proto-personas and personas are often
225:
Other critics argue that personas can be reductive or stereotypic, leading to a false sense of confidence in an organization's knowledge about its users. Critics like Steve
Portigal argue that personas' "appeal comes from the seduction of a sanitized form of reality," where customer data is
230:
generalized as the same resource, however, proto-personas are a generative tool used to identify a team's assumptions about their target users. Personas, on the other hand, should be rooted in customer data and research, and be used as a way to coalesce insights about particular segments.
239:
Milham, Elrif, and Alford have demonstrated with survey data that descriptions with more than a few attributes (e.g., such as a persona) are likely to describe very few if any real people. They argued that personas cannot be assumed to be descriptive of actual customers.
782:
Köhler, T. (2001). Methoden der
Analyse computervermittelter Kommunikation: ein kritischer Überblick; In: Frindte, W., Köhler, T., Marquet, P. & Nissen, E.: IN-TELE 99 - Internet-based teaching and learning 99. Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt am
62:, where marketers use the results of statistical analysis and qualitative observations to draw profiles, giving them names and personalities to paint a picture of a person that could exist in real life. The term
77:
buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website. Personas may be used as a tool during the
164:
Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
672:
Jenkinson, A (1997) CustomerPrints: Defining the
Essentials of the Consumer: The essential guide to what CustomerPrints are, why and how to do them and even how to use them. Truffles. OgilvyOne
109:, personas are also widely used in sales, advertising, marketing and system design. Personas provide common behaviors, outlooks, and potential objections of people matching a given persona.
167:
Proposed solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.
152:
Personas also help prevent some common design pitfalls. The first is designing for what Cooper calls "The
Elastic User", by which he means that while making product decisions different
222:
argued that there is no procedure to work reliably from given data to specific personas, and thus such a process is not subject to the scientific method of reproducible research.
133:. In this book, Cooper outlines the general characteristics, uses and best practices for creating personas, recommending that software be designed for single archetypal users.
729:"Review of 'The persona lifecycle: Keeping people in mind throughout product design,' by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2006"
813:
267:) have been suggested by McGinn and Kotamraju. These personas are claimed to address the shortcomings of qualitative persona generation (see
214:
Criticism of personas falls into three general categories: analysis of the underlying logic, concerns about practical implementation, and
828:
870:
An empirical study demonstrating how different design constraints, project organization, and contexts limited the utility of personas
1075:
937:. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Florence, Italy: ACM Press. pp. 1521–1524.
912:
794:
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980:. Proceedings of the 2003 conference on Designing for user experiences. San Francisco, California: ACM Press. pp. 1–15.
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399:
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Biography containing personal interests, professional goals, and any other relevant information designers should know
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While features will vary based on project needs, all personas will capture the essence of an actual potential user.
1085:
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900:. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 52nd Annual Meeting. New York, NY. pp. 1107–1111.
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106:
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is used widely in online and technology applications as well as in advertising, where other terms such as
325:
1058:
850:
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Valuing Your
Customers, From quality information to quality relationships through database marketing
284:
1036:
271:). Academic scholars have proposed several methods for data-driven persona development, such as
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Provide a human "face" so as to create empathy for the persons represented by the demographics.
21:
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305:
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Basic demographics (age, race, gender, education, marital status, preferred language, etc.)
79:
50:
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8:
418:"Feral segmentation: How cultural intermediaries perform market segmentation in the wild"
391:
146:
59:
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Personas, participatory design and product development: an infrastructure for engagement
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A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of
1095:
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920:. Proceedings of the Irish Ergonomics Society Annual Conference. Dublin. pp. 1–10.
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872:. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) 2005. Waikoloa, HI, USA.
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Help support better design choices by limiting the focus of user for the designers.
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Personas revisited: Extending the Use of
Personas to Enhance Participatory Design
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Helps understands what motivates audience to learn more about products/service.
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According to Pruitt and Adlin, the use of personas offers several benefits in
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interviews, and participant observation. Personas are one of the outcomes of
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Bowen, Judy; Petrie, Helen; Hinze, Annika; Samaddar, Sanjit (October 2020).
365:
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Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of
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Personalized fictional characters representing a consumer or user category
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Chapman, CN; Love, E; Milham, RP; ElRif, P; Alford, JL (September 2008).
570:
118:
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Real or
Imaginary: The Effectiveness of using Personas in Product Design
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The
Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
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492:
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Jenkinson, Angus (2009). "What happened to strategic segmentation?".
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54:
1045:(2nd ed.), Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation,
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Chapman, CN; Milham, R (October 2006), "The personas' new clothes",
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Lidwell, William; Holden, Kritina; Butler, Jill (January 1, 2010).
360:
83:
25:
Here, the illustration person called Femi is a persona used online
63:
121:, a noted pioneer software developer, proposed the concept of a
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the online business and technology community in his 1999 book
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A study conducted by Long claimed support for Cooper, Pruitt
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Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing
511:. 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
506:
648:
Journal of Direct, Data, and Digital Marketing Practice
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931:McGinn, Jennifer (Jen); Kotamraju, Nalini (2008).
894:Quantitative evaluation of personas as information
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414:
1030:. Participatory Design Conference. Malmo, Sweden.
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796:Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) 2006
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202:Disabilities, accessibility needs, or challenges
160:The persona benefits are summarized as follows:
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1042:The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction
1039:, in Soegaard, Mads; Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.),
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415:Diaz Ruiz, Carlos A.; Kjellberg, Hans (2020).
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263:Data-driven personas (sometimes also called
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466:"User Personas and Social Media Profiles"
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685:Pruitt, John; Adlin, Tamara (2006).
625:. Maidenhead, England: McGraw Hill.
598:Jenkinson, Angus (March 31, 1994).
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1021:Grudin, J; Pruitt, J (June 2002).
575:The inmates are running the asylum
131:The Inmates are Running the Asylum
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727:Gagliano, Ross (September 2006).
289:non-negative matrix factorization
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187:Fake name and profile picture
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281:principal component analysis
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851:"The Trouble with Personas"
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255:) were not controlled for.
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1076:Human–computer interaction
868:Rönkkö, K (January 2005).
326:Online identity management
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90:principles to things like
767:Chapman & Milham 2006
621:Jenkinson, Angus (1995).
544:. Wiley Publishing, Inc.
183:Common features include:
911:Long, Frank (May 2009).
827:Portigal, Steve (2008).
711:Grudin & Pruitt 2002
464:Humphrey, Aaron (2017).
435:10.1177/1470593120920330
285:latent semantic analysis
117:Within software design,
1086:Technical communication
943:10.1145/1357054.1357292
745:10.1145/1167867.1164070
517:10.1145/3419249.3420135
1035:Nielsen, Lene (2014),
336:Personalized marketing
82:process for designing
26:
986:10.1145/997078.997089
878:10.1109/HICSS.2005.85
660:10.1057/dddmp.2009.27
600:"Beyond segmentation"
540:Goodwin, Kim (2009).
265:quantitative personas
141:Benefits and features
86:. They can introduce
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351:Scenario (computing)
341:Personal information
306:Behavioral targeting
259:Data-driven personas
205:Opinions and beliefs
80:user-centered design
51:user-centered design
1101:Identity management
1091:Market segmentation
855:Simpson Scarborough
829:"Persona Non Grata"
802:, San Francisco, CA
689:. Morgan Kaufmann.
392:Rockport Publishers
234:Scientific research
196:A summarizing quote
147:product development
60:market segmentation
88:interaction design
70:may also be used.
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1052:978-87-92964-00-7
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401:978-1-61058-065-6
346:Personal identity
216:empirical results
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610:(1): 60–72.
526:10289/13989
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119:Alan Cooper
1070:Categories
1037:"Personas"
632:0077079507
373:References
273:clustering
1096:Marketing
1081:Usability
753:1530-2180
451:219027435
443:1470-5931
269:Criticism
210:Criticism
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573:(1999).
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