7 core ideas about personas and user experiences

1.http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/9245.html "> Personas earlier than user experience research

The father of the persona, Alan Cooper, is not the inventor of the persona concept. This concept has been in the market and advertising industry for decades.

At the same time, marketing director Angus Jenkinson developed persona concepts and methodologies for usability research in the mid 1990s. He presented the concept of critical moments and contact points in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in 1988, and then first introduced the idea of personas in a 1994 paper, "Beyond subdivision."

Cooper also developed a similar concept in the 1995, recommending the development of software in the mind by creating specific rather than generalized users.

Unlike personas, users mean different things to different people, often used to describe average customers. In the area of user experience, personas are used to define and design interactive products. The characters are unusually simple but powerful, Cooper says.

2. Personas are not hypothetical clients created by the marketing sector

Personas (persona) and users (user) have different meanings. Personas are a typical user of a system and an example of a class of users who will interact with it. Personas are a brief introduction to fictional characters, based on ethnographic studies, surveys or interviews. The most outstanding personas have chic avatars and names, such as Marcus or Shannon. People and pictures can be fake, but the details should be true.

Personas are not a list of tasks, obligations, or responsibilities. They are typical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. They represent real users to guide design and functional decision-making. Personas allow you to ask such questions to focus on design thinking: Will Marcus do that?

3. Personas are not what customers like and dislike

Personas focus on what users do, what makes them frustrated, and what makes them happy. A good character is a story that describes a person's typical day and experience, including his skills, attitude, background, environment, and goals. Personas tell us about their motivations, expectations, desires, and behaviors. Personas make the user lifelike, providing a specific object for the developer to assist in the design of the final product.

4. Personas answer very specific questions

Personas can provide details about important issues that users cannot define.

at some point in the day, what information does the user need? Do users only focus on one thing at a time? Is it often interfered with in the user's experience? Why did he/she use this product? What drives him/her to use a product rather than a competitor?

By using personas to answer these questions, the product design team can actually stand up to the user's perspective and better meet the needs and desires of the actual user. Personas are not people talking about themselves, but the observation and description of why a person does what he or she is doing.

5. Personas can provide very real benefits for user experience Research

In the design and development phase, personas are effective. It helps designers move their attention away from requirements and outputs (deliverables) to focus on user goals. Personas give you a name, a face, and a story for the user you are designing, and it transforms the user's concept into a real person with his own views, feelings, and sounds. If you don't know who you're designing for, you can't actually design anything.

Personas can discover new opportunities for improving the site or software experience. Personas each time a chair is configured for the user in front of the conference table. It helps end users always get involved in the product.

Personas Help:

defines a specific user's goals and requirements give the design team a consensus focus on discovering opportunities and product gaps, with development strategies focused on the design of manageable objects that represent larger groups without covering the needs of the entire user base, Significantly reduce the time and cost of obtaining user requirements help designers to understand the user's behavior, motivation, and expectations in an empathetic manner (the designer can look at the persona) to help prioritize the design elements, The economic solution to the conflict of design opinions can continually evaluate and validate the design on a persona basis to reduce the frequency of usability testing

6. Don't overdo Personas

If a team spends too much effort and effort to create personas, and explores too much from the minutiae of a persona story, it wastes a lot of time in the development phase, creating a huge amount of useless documents. These excessive efforts make personas an unnecessary activity.

Creating a good persona requires a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, but should be done in 1-2 pages. It is not a job description. Remember not to dwell on details, such as tasks, duties, and responsibilities, so that you can focus on skills, attitudes, motivations, environments, and goals.

7. Good point, but better motivation

It's also important to listen to what the customer says is good for the business, but the danger comes from focusing too much on what the customer thinks he or she wants. Many times users don't know what they want, but they think about what they want. Even if they do know what they want, they are not necessarily able to express it well. Avoid questioning opinions and focus on motivation (personas are created around motivation).

Source: http://article.yeeyan.org/view/200085/383121