It is important when working on creating or improving an experience that everyone working on the project has a shared understanding of the person who will have that experience; the customer, user, guest, patient or adventurer. Working directly with people participating in the design process is often best. But, often teams need to design for people they don’t know. Ensuring that everyone has a similar vision in their mind helps facilitate effective communication so that excellent products and experiences can be created. Personas provide that description.
“Personas bring the team together to create one shared vision of exactly whom you’re designing for and what they want.”
“Personas put a face on user research in a way that turns data into the kind of knowledge that leads to better user experiences and better web sites”
I have been looking for a good book that describes the best way to use personas in the experience design process. The best one I have found so far is The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas For The Web by Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar. While the title makes it seem like it is just for user experience professionals, this is actually one of the better resources for looking at personas for any experience professional, UX, CX, or otherwise. It introduces personas for business strategy and cross-channel experiences.
“Wrapping a strategy in a series of stories about users is an extremely effective way to cross the communications gap.”
“Business strategy is concerned with the entire length and breadth of user interactions, across all the channels in which the business is involved (and even channels which it might not yet be involved). When you develop business strategy personas, it is often useful to start by analyzing the entire user lifecycle: awareness, intent, purchase, and service.”
This book has chapters on: creating personas, conducting qualitative research, conducting quantitative research, generating persona segmentation, making personas real, directing a business strategy and measuring success.
“Personas summarize user research findings and bring that research to life in such a way that everyone can make decisions based on these personas, not based on themselves.”
This book is a good introduction to creating and using personas. It includes information on gathering data through quantitative and qualitative research; using both field studies and CRM data. The book also describes including business value and customer segmentation as part of the persona process, enabling teams to focus on features with the best ROI.
Personas are a key experience design tool and this is a great resource for someone who wants to learn how to create and use them.
The User is Always Right is available on Amazon.
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