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Personas

Presentation by Damian Gorman

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What is a training workshop?

Personas are all about building empathy amongst teams

  • A persona is a fictional character that can be used to represent a collection of some of the kinds of people who could potentially be using a particular design.

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Personas

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Personas

Typically, in user-centred design the designers will use several personas to test the

viability of a design. The personas allow the designers to consider the range of

stakeholders that might be using their designs, and allows the designer to look

their designs from these stakeholders’ perspectives.

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The need for personas was initially identified in the mid-1990s in the marketing sector, followed quickly by the software sector, and then quickly spreading to a range of design disciplines.

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Benefits that have been suggested for personas include a suggestion that for designers working in groups, they are given a common, consistent understanding of the dimensions of diversity and can communicate and brainstorm more effectively about diversity to each other.

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Personas

It also allows the designers to focus on the users of their design and encourages the designers to learn more about those users and understand how they will use the design.

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Personas

Some researchers have criticised the use of personas by indicating that for evaluating a design, the use of real customers who will be using the design is more realistic and preferable to the use of personas which are fictional characters.

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There is no doubt that using a wide range of real customers is one of the strongest forms of evaluation, but there are many cases where this is not possible, and personas are an effective alternative.

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Some scientific studies (e.g. Frank Long, 2009, “Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design”) on the use of personas have shown that personas can result in more usable designs, more user-centred discussions, and more effective communication in design teams.

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Personas

  1. Choose questions for your survey
  2. Set up a survey on a popular page
  3. Analyze your data
  4. Build your persona

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Personas

  1. Identify behavioural variables
  2. Map survey subjects to behavioural variables
  3. Identify significant behaviour patterns
  4. Synthesise characteristics and relevant goals
  5. Check for completeness and redundancy
  6. Expand description of attributes and behaviours
  7. Designate persona types

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Persona

A useful persona is not just a demographic, it is always more than an age and a job title, because it helps you understand the motivations, fears, and concerns of your ideal customer and market.

A useful persona includes features that you don’t agree with and isn’t your organisational narrative.

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User Stories

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User Stories

A user story is one or more sentences in the everyday language that captures what a user does or needs to do as part of their job function.

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User Stories

Example

    • As a user, I want to search for my customers both by their first and last names.
    • As a non-administrative user, I want to modify my own schedules but not the schedules of other users.

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User Stories

User stories are often written from the perspective of an end-user or user of a system.

They are often recorded on index cards, on Post-it notes, or in project management software.

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Thanks!

Get in touch! email@email.com

Blended Learning Train-the-Trainer - BLITT

2021-1-SI01-KA220-AD-000037772

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Copyright © 2023 BLITT

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