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.

Having Conquered Flickr & Yahoo, "The Newsfeed" Is Now the Dominant Info-Metaphor of Our Time

The internet is really exciting. There's a whole lot of information on it - an overwhelming amount, even. Years ago we first looked at it in monochrome text, then we started looking at it through a search box on an empty white page. What's next? Is it huge War Games style multi-monitor displays? A swirling UI somewhere between Tom Cruise in Minority Report and David Bowie in Labrynth? Today we're ready to declare The Newsfeed the dominant internet metaphor of the day; the cascading waterfall of updates from your friends, with comments swirling even around those - that model is everywhere now! Today one of the biggest photo sharing websites and the biggest news and email portal in the world both fell under the spell of the Newsfeed.

Mobile social money, the final frontier? In the final part of discussions of social networks, media, banking and money, I thought I would turn attention to the use of mobile devices as access media to these networks. Mobile usage in banking has grown to a crescendo in the past year, after bubbling away nicely since the turn of this century. This is in part down to the fact that the latest smartphones allow a bank to deploy fully functional internet banking services to mobile devices using the same platform as their main websites. In other words, it is now cost-effective and appropriate to do this. However, the challenge with mobile finance is that we tend to discuss mobiles as one homogenous group of devices when: (a) there are many devices; and (b) the use of mobile devices to access financial services are not homogenous. Let’s look at (a) first.

Yet another reminder of the old saying “Those who can do. Those who can’t teach.” You couldn’ be further from the truth. Facebook, or more generically any social networking platform, has significant advantages such as the ability to instantly add/configure/customize/network an application. This dramatically lowers the barriers to entry (correct on that point), but it also lowers the cost of switching for users. Yes, creating a standard (massive usage) creates a barrier to switching, but not an insurmountable barrier. Frankly, “social networking” as application is boring to me and it may prove to be a fad. I don’t really care about the minor personal gestures of my 400+ friends. But the social platform is exceptionally compelling to me as a user, developer and visionary. Social discovery and vetting of application is huge. I’ll drop one app and add a competitor in 2 minutes. My friends will do the same if it offers a compelling value. Your application of the old school metrics of the PC platform to a social platform ignores the low switching costs, social discovery of applications, incredibly low marketing costs and all of the other benefits of a social platform that will power future applications. The fact that one person in a dorm room can write a killer app that can spread virally is exceptionally powerful. That simply cannot happen on the PC. It can happen on the web, but having done it a couple of times myself, I can tell you it is costly. Will Facebook become the ultimate platform, will OpenSocial win, will browsers encapsulate social connectivity across all websites/webapps, will the semantic web finally deliver? I don’t know the winner, but social apps are here to stay. Yes there will be a lot of crap apps, but the social fabric will help separate the wheat from the chaff. Sorry, but I give your analysis an F :)

Facebook’s most important strategic asset is not its community of developers but its network of users.

Does Platform build or leverage this strategic asset?

Deep metaphors are basic frames or orientations we have toward the world around us.

deep metaphor