User Personas Anyone?

User Personas.

Do you use user personas in your UX department? We’re starting up a project to standardize the way our government agency creates and uses personas. We have a few scattered areas of UX and the personas are being created and used in a very inconsistent way. The Project will look at all the personas we’ve created over the years, rationalize a standardized format in workshops with the UX practitioners and developers, and end up with a catalogue of validated personas and usage scenarios.

Personas are often brainstormed by UX or development teams, and put into a nicely formatted template. The vital part that is often skipped is validating the personas by researching and interviewing the actual user group being represented. Garbage in, garbage out. You often hear people saying that “you need to walk a mile in another person’s shoes”.  When I hear this I always imagine a baby wearing cowboy boots. Few people can do this successfully; there is no replacement for testing with the actual users of your product.

Some UX practitioners discourage the use of personas, as they worry that if the development or content creation teams use personas, then they may choose to skip important steps in the UCD process such as basic research into the users and usability tests of prototypes. Personas are a great supplement to the UCD process, but are not a replacement for proper research and testing.

Feel free to join the site and tell us how you use (or don’t use) personas in your design process.

Article and Photo by: Jonathan Rath

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