“It prevents burnouts and ameliorates loathings and lightens the spirit and lets the psyche breathe and I am now utterly convinced that we are all idiots. Or rather, the Europeans, with their regular, multi-month vacations, are geniuses. And the Australians are super-geniuses. Three months per year, paid. They pity us. They sip their Victoria Bitter and grin and make their enviable plans to travel across Asia on a Vespa for the summer and they look at us and shake their heads and say, ‘Jesus, with a brutal mortgage payment and a weekly performance evaluation, we are just *so sorry* you’re an American…’”

“A persona is a profile of a typical user; it is a description of an archetypal user synthesized from a series of interviews with real people and includes a name, a social history, and a set of goals that drive the design of the product or web site.”

“Market segmentation and personas are two different techniques that are often perceived as conflicting methods, but they are actually complementary tools that organizations can use to design and sell successful products.”

“A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype — whose goals and behavior patterns are well understood — you can satisfy the broader group of people represented by that archetype.”

“Armed with solutions to the dilemma of how dependent every one of us is becoming on electronic products, the author argues that, despite appearances, business executives are simply not in control of the high-tech industry. He explains how talented people continuously design bad technology-based products and uses his own work to show businesses of all sizes how to harness talent to create products that will both thrill users and grow the bottom line.”

“Cooper’s personas are simply pretend users of the system you’re building. You describe them, in a surprising amount of detail, and then design your system for them. Each cast of personas has at least one primary persona, the person who must be satisfied with the system you deliver. Since you can’t build everything for every persona (and you wouldn’t want to), the establishment of the primary persona is critical in focusing the team’s efforts effectively.”

A collection of emailed thoughts like: “I use personas extensively. We use them to guide our initial design decisions and then to test our designs cognitively (’OK, I’m now Janice; how would I think here?’). I also find it helps prevent the elastic user concept from getting too entrenched among the development team, although I haven’t had the success Cooper has in selling personas to programmers. That is, some programmers have been much more receptive to the use of personas than others.” See also iawiki: User Personas and http://iawiki.net/PersonasDesign” title=”External WWW link”>iawiki: Personas Design.

“You read about personas in ‘The Inmates are Running the Asylum.’ You know that using them improves your interactive designs and helps get your coworkers on the same boat. You did your ethnographic research, created a useful persona set and are ready to start designing for the needs of your personas. But first you have to document and share your personas with your colleagues.”

“If we want to design good user interfaces, we have to know who we’re designing them for. The personas answer this question by presenting a cast of made-up people, presented with rigorous detail, believed to be representative. We only care about people that are hands-on, interacting with the software.”

“George Olsen, a Web architect for How2.com, was a strong supporter of creating personas for projected users at the recent Builder.com conference. Personas are composites of the potential users you encounter during target audience investigations. Instead of pleading the case of the anonymous and ubiquitous ‘user,’ the iRippage.com team can defend the rights of Garrett, Seth, or Jessie.”

“So let’s play a game. Your name is Sam. You are a 52 year old typesetter. You smart, college educated, and a bit artsy — after all, you are keeping this great old art of hand made books alive! And your daughter just bought you a computer. Sarah got it for Christmas. She set it up, ran the wires, and even ordered an Earthlink account. She then showed you how to dial up, and made Yahoo! your start page. And she told you there are great pages showing old books online. So here you are, you’ve been looking at it all week, and it’s been looking at you. You fire it up…”

“Scenarios are stories in which the product being designed is placed within the lives of its intended users. People, software, hardware and the interaction that binds them together constitute the typical cast of characters for scenarios. These players are placed in a physical setting and given a role within the story of the products use.” See also iawiki: User Scenarios and iawiki: Scenario Development.

“Use concrete tasks to focus on specific instances, problem cases, extreme cases etc. The rationale here is similar to Cooper’s thinking on personas, as discussed last week. Many people call these concrete tasks scenarios although Lewis and Rieman use scenario to refer to the working through of the concrete task using the new interface.”

“,Two IAs [Lisa Boleyn, Sabrina Jetton] describe the deliverables an Information Architect creates. They show how User Scenarios, Interaction Flows, Architecture Maps, and Storyboards lead to better products.”

These downloads from Adaptive Path include persona and scenario deliverables: “In order to ensure that their solutions are not only relevant, but workable, it’s critical that IAs be involved in deeply understanding organizations and their customers.”