Cerveau Digital

The persona lifecycle

9 min de lecture

The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design Livre sur la création et la Communication de Persona pour la UX

For all the people brave enough to stand up in a room full of smart, powerful people and say, “This doesn’t make sense. Let’s try something new.” And for all the smart, powerful people brave enough to listen.

Agenda

1 THE NEXT FRONTIER FOR USER-CENTERED DESIGN: MAKING USER REPRESENTATIONS MORE USABLE 2 THE PERSONA LIFECYCLE: A FRAMEWORK FOR THE PERSONA APPROACH 3 PHASE 1: FAMILY PLANNING (PLANNING A PERSONA EFFORT) 4 PHASE 2: CONCEPTION & GESTATION (CREATING PERSONAS) 5 PHASE 3: BIRTH & MATURATION (LAUNCHING AND COMMUNICATING PERSONAS) 6 PHASE 4: ADULTHOOD (USING PERSONAS) 7 PHASE 5: LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AND RETIREMENT (ROI AND REUSE OF PERSONAS)

Persona definition P.3

Personas are powerful imaginary people who can help you build products that real people actually like to use. Personas are detailed descriptions of imaginary people constructed out of well-understood, highly specified data about real people. \

Personas should be more than a collection of facts. Personas should be compelling stories that unfold over time in the minds of your product’s team.

Also, persona should be evolving and extensible. People in the team should be able to extend them

Persona benefits P.4

  • Increase your products usability, utility, and general appeal
  • Streamline your teams’ processes and improve your colleagues abilities to work together
  • Enable your company to make business decisions that help both your company and your customers
  • Improve your company’s bottom line.

All vou have to do is bring them to life and give them jobs.

Other persona benefits P.14

  • Make assumptions and knowledge about users explicit, creating a common language
  • Make better design decisions
    • by focusing about specific users (who are not like you)
    • by limiting our choices (and not try to do everything)
  • Create interest and empathy about users

3 problems that personas help with P.7

  1. Going from self-centered Perspective to User-centered perspective (“You are not the user”)
  2. Dealing with user diversity (in Needs, Desires, preferences and behaviors) and seemingly conflicting desires
  3. Personas make assumptions about users explicit, available and easy to understand, because those doing user research are not the ones building & designing the product

You are a professional imaginer P.4

When you build a product, you need to understand :

For that, you have to become a professional imaginer, who can build a concrete mental image of customers.

The main difficulties are :

  • knowing if the people you imagine have any resemblance with the real people who use your product.
  • Incorporating real users data into the chaotic product development world

Our goal as product designer / researcher

Our first goal as product designers should be to build a shared, data-driven, well-communicated vision of the user to focus the efforts of the product team

“User” is not a helpful word

L’idée des personas est d’éliminer le mot ‘utilisateur’ de ton organisation, dans tous les artefacts de communication, et les conversations. On les remplace par le nom des personas.

Le nombre de références au mot utilisateur avant /après est le KPI d'une campagne de communication pour les personas

It is a catchall term. It reflects a technology-centric, rather than people-centric perspective. In an emergency room, it is not enough to say that a person is injured. Doctors need to know the type of injury, the part of the body injured, the severity of the injury, its effect on vital metrics, and so on before they can decide on a treatment. Persona are way more accurate than “User”

To undersand users, we collect data

It is necessary to know the class of people who will be using the system… by knowing the user’s work experience, educational level, age, previous computer experience, and so on, it is possible to anticipate their learning difficulties to some extent and to better set appropriate limits for the complexity of the user interace. — J. Nielsen, 1993

Reports and other artifacts aren’t very useful

Comme dans le jeu du téléphone arabe, le message est transformé et dilué avant d’arriver aux PMs, designers et développeurs

Personas help to communicate information about users P.11

Personas are fictitions, specific, concrete representations of targer users. They put a face on the user : a memorable, engaging, and actionable image that serves as a design target. They convey informations that artifacts cannot convey.

You can’t design for all personas P.12

Because of that, you need to design for a primary persona and focus on this one.

Persona vs. User roles P.29

A user role, in contrast to personas, does not look or sound like a real person; it’s an abstraction — a relationship, not a person, title, job, description or function. It is defined as a set of characteristic needs, interests, behaviors, and expectations. — Constantine and Lockwood 2001

How to fail a persona P.39

  • The effort was not accepted or supported by the leadership team
  • the personas were not credible and not associated with methodological rigor and data
  • The personas were poorly communicated
  • The product design and development team did not understand how to use them

How many personas to keep ? P.230

We need a set of persona where each is distinct and easy to talk about (for the team).

Do I have enough personas? Existing set of Personas must cover most stories, and adding more would have diminishing returns.

I noticed things that are not explained by existing personas, do we need to create a new one ?

  • How likely is it that a user has this specific set of skills / specific behavior ?
    • If these users exist, **are they doing significantly different things with the product ?*
    • Do they have very different goals ? Are they performing different tasks ?

Stage 1 - Persona development checklist P.380

Check that you have :

  • Persona with asocial and cultural context
  • Stories ot help understand the current experience and pain points of persona

Stage 2 - Explore design solutions with your persona

Personas helped you understand the big picture ? Now they can help you design specific features and elements. You can use :

  • Tightly scoped story illustrating how persona explores, reacts and experiences our design (called scenario)
  • Design mapping (a form of storyboard)
  • Mood boards and visual design explorations

Insert your persona in a context to make it live P.379

“The persona is static, but the figure becomes dynamic when it is inserted into the actions of the scenario. In the scenario, the persona will be in a context, in a specific situation and have a specific goal.” —Lene Nielsen 2003

Communicate relevants aspects of the persona to your audience p.379

We have found that we do emphasize different aspects of the persona for each audience we interface with during the analysis and design process. For example, we capture and reference design implications and user needs for the core design team but don’t usually share or discuss these areas with stakeholders and executives. For these groups, we use the personas during executive briefings to help educate and inform, and sometimes to justify a design solution and/or raise a red flag about an issue not considered.

Start the persona initiative

Vois Comment lancer une initiative:

Pour créer une initiative dans une entreprise Hiérarchique, parles en d’abord à un petit comité de managers impactés pour avoir leur accord. ‘keep them in the know’ Une fois cela fait tu peux en parler à plus grande échelle et ces managers t’aideront à ‘champion’ ton initiative — The persona lifecycle

Pour chaque audience les questions qu’ils vont nous poser :

  • quelle est la méthode persona et pourquoi ça marche ?
  • qui sont les personas?
  • comment les personnes ont-ils été créé et pourquoi les a-t-on créé comme ça ?
  • comment les personnages doivent être utilisées dans le cycle de design et de développement du produit ?

Pour chaque stakeholder, adapte ta communication en réponse à :

  • comment est divisé mon équipe produit, entre quels rôles?
  • quels sont leurs objectifs de travail et leur challenge ?
  • de quelle part du processus de développement sont-ils responsables ?
  • quel type d’information à propos des personas les aideraient dans leur boulot
  • quand est-ce qu’ils auront le temps et l’énergie mentale requise pour étudier les personas?

Adopt their Perspective and give them what they want:

  • Marketing folks are more interested in purchase motivators and the context in which the decision to buy is made (+demographics)
  • Executives use the personas in road shows as evidence “that our organization actually knows how to walk the walk of being customer centered.”
  • QA looks for the core tasks that people perform, so that they can build robust test case early in the project.
  • Developers use it for communication purpose
  • Usability specialists use them to create task descriptions and scenarios and to determine criteria for recruiting test participants.
  • Project managers look for clues to help them prioritize work, and to ideally remove work entirely from the project schedule.

Maintaining personas

Une fois les personna créés il faut assigner une personne pour maintenir un persona

Cette personne doit :

  • lister les questions de l’organisation à propos du persona 
  • proposer des réponses à ces questions 
  • communiquer ces réponses 
  • revoir le persona en correspondance

Des gens vont challenger la crédibilité des personas

  • d’où viennent ces personas?

  • sont-ils assez précis ?

  • ont-ils vraiment de la valeur ?

On veut donc ajouter de la crédibilité dans tous nos artifacts de communication. 

La crédibilité dépend de la confiance en notre équipe, qui doit démontrer expertise et rigueur.

Les gens veulent savoir :

  • est-ce que les personas sont basés sur de la recherche (rigueur)
  • est-ce que l’équipe de management était d’accord (autorité)
  • est-ce que d’autres compagnies ont trouvé ça utile ? (Expertise)

Avoir le buy-in de l’organisation

Effet Ikea d’entreprise / comment faire changer les gens : Comment faire une demande à quelqu’un

Le mieux pour améliorer l’adoption d’un changement est de faire participer les gens à la conception de ce changement. (The persona lifecycle, P.315)

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