Personas
Posted on November 9, 2007
Category Best Practices, User Interface, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments
How do you write if you’re just starting out, and have no feedback from your readers yet?
If you’re writing for a Web 2.0 audience, how do you decide the level of interaction you should have, if you don’t have a “baseline” to start from?
Sometimes when we write, our writing (and the information provided) may become dumbed down or too vanilla in an attempt to meet the needs of all possible users. In an attempt to please everyone, we end up pleasing no one, least of all ourselves as writers.
Does this sound familiar?
Using personas to identify and define a specific reader (or more often, a number of specific readers) can be a good method of avoiding this trap.
There can be a bit of a Catch-22 issue here. An excellent method of creating a persona is to interview someone who you believe to be close to the persona you are trying to create. That can’t always happen, so this is where smarts, research and hopefully a good marketing team can fill in.
What information are you looking for? Here are a few suggestions for the type of questions you need to be able to answer to create good personas…
- Who they are
- age
- gender
- location
- Reason for visiting the website
- pre-sales
- just looking
- have a problem they need solving
- are unhappy with the service/product
- want to purchase accessories
- Browsing information
- what type of computer/browser do they use
- do they use mobile systems (PDA, Smartphone) for access
- do they use public systems
- how often do they use the web
If you can ask actual people, all the better, if not, talk to your marketing or sales department for information about who is buying your product. Talk to the technical people who are responsible for maintaining the servers and websites to find out how long people spend on the site, what pages they visit, what types of browsers they use and if they fill in feedback forms when they are there.
Talk to the people who designed the website itself, they may already have defined personas for their own use, or have user testing information that can go a long way in helping you to create your own.
However you create your personas, you need to be able to define what a particular persona would want from the information you are presenting. You need to be able to understand what they need, how they want the information presented, what they would find to be the best and most effective method of performing a particular task.
Once you have defined these (and other elements) you can start using these personas and ‘write for them’ rather than writing for a generic user.
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It appears our thoughts are cosmically aligned as I posted about “knowing your audience” at the same time you posted this.
Personas are, as you point out, hugely valuable but can be very difficult to get right. As someone in my office quipped: “If you ever meet someone that matches your persona 100%, then watch out, he’s probably an alien!”.
As long as you recognise that a persona is a representation of a user (customer) then they are very powerful. Some of ours have photos attached to help the development team visualise who they are.
[...] Addendum: Charles Cooper has been considering the same thing. [...]
I’m a big fan of creating personas before launching into any sort of design, architecture or writing. When we drive home our point about audience analysis, we need to be walking the walk. And the new Stever Mulder/Ziv Yaar book, The User is Always Right, articulates the benefits of personas so well – it’s great to be able to provide the book as a resource to clients who think might think the exercise is fluff. It’s funny to hear them downplay the idea of peraons, even as they talk about the personas as if they’re sitting in the room with us.
I’m a big fan of adding the big picture in personas as well. What is you personas usual day?
Do they use your application/website hourly/daily/incidentally? Are they tech-savvy or computer illiterates? Simply put: what is the place of your website/application in their world.