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An introduction to personas and how to create them Written by Tina Calabria, published March 2nd, 2004 Categorised under: articles, intranets, usability & information architecture, websites Before embarking on any intranet or website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the intranet or website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill. There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution. This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own. If you want to know more, there are lots of resources available, particularly the work of Alan Cooper and colleagues at Cooper Interaction Design. Alan is credited with having created the first persona for software development purposes back in the early 1980s.

What are personas? Personas are archetypal users of an intranet or website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ’stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design. Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo. Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is conducted before they are written to ensure they represent end users rather than the opinion of the person writing the personas. Below is a sample persona for an intranet project. This persona describes Bob, a 52 year old mechanic that works for a road service company. From Bob’s persona you can start to get a feel for his goals when using the new intranet. He wants to avoid feeling stupid, would like to retain his status as a mentor to his younger colleagues, whilst seeing the potential of the intranet to make him more informed when interacting with customers.

Business Model Designer From Sticky Note To Screen Interaction

Here’s advise from Steve Jobs in managing in a downturn. "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."

Value creation generates wealth

Any business has three levels of value definition - value defined by shareholders, customers and employees/partnership. Shareholder value is the primary value component no business can survive without and provides for the long term agility of an organisation. Customers provide medium term liquidity and employees the operational cash flow to ensure the continued operation of an enterprise. An enterprise architect must have a good understanding of wealth creation formula like economic value add to assess the contribution of IT to Wealth Creation

Reversing the Enterprise 2.0 Pricing Model

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes. Pricing Tied to Volume Enterprise social computing offerings -- such as social networks or the numerous Twitter-for-the-enterprise applications that currently abound -- generally don't have complex pricing structures. They are volume-discount based: that is, the more accounts customers buy, and the more employees who use them, the larger the discount vendors give them, and the lower their average price per user will be. Some vendors advertise flat pricing schemes, but when a customer is big enough, a volume-discount deal inevitably creeps in. Value and Cost Out of Balance

Volume-discount pricing structures are simple, tried, and true. So, why aren't they efficient? The reason is because of where returns on investment (ROIs) are located. Enterprise social computing offerings provide increasing marginal productivity as they scale, at both the individual and organizational level. The more that employees use a service, the higher the margin gained by their company in productivity, and the more the company extracts value from the product. A corporate customer that has 10% of its employees using a Twitter-like product won't extract as much value as one that has 50% of its employees using it.

McElhaney, Kellie A., Toffel, Michael W., Hill, Natalie. (forthcoming 2005). Designing Sustainability at BMW Group: The Designworks/ USA Experience. Strategic Sustainability

McElhaney, K. & Hill, N. (December 2003). Human Right in Business: The Case of Hewlett-Packard United Nation Global Compact. UN Global Compact case book forthcoming in 2004. McElhaney, Kellie A. (December 2003). Ways in Which Academia Can Assist Business in CSR Programmes. The International Chamber of Commerce Guide to Corporate Social Responsibility 2003. PPf Publishing, London, England. McElhaney, Kellie A. November, 2003. Strategic Partnerships in Corporate Social Responsibility. Welcoming Brief for G8 Summit in London and Dubai. Michael W. Toffel, Natalie Hill & Kellie A. McElhaney. 2003. Developing a Management Systems Approach to Sustainability at BMW Group, with Natalie Hill and Kellie A. McElhaney, Corporate Environmental Strategy: International Journal of Corporate Sustainability 10 (2): 29-39. Michael W. Toffel, Natalie Hill & Kellie A. McElhaney. 2003. BMW Group's Sustainability Management System: Preliminary Results, Ongoing Challenges, the UN Global Compact. Corporate Environmental Strategy: International Journal of Corporate Sustainability 10 (3): 51-61.

Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility

How Strategic Imagination Happens

That's this: thinking differently about strategy is impossible - or, perhaps worse, that it's naïve.

Let's take a second to explore.