In role playing games, players are faced with the task of creating a role playing character. For good role playing, these characters need a detailed background story. They have a personality, their own wishes, their own quirks and their own appearance. Many tricks exist to get to exciting characters fast. Personas are very much like role playing characters and the same techniques can be used to create interesting personas.
1. NAW
Basic information consists of name, age, gender, occupation and location. Age and gender can be determined semi-randomly (with several dice-rolls), a location can be chosen randomly from a list. When developing a persona, it makes sense to take these random traits from a distribution similar to those found with real-life users. If the age in a typical user group is between 35 and 45, pick some random value between 35 and 45. Do not fall into the trap of picking the average, because that would create a very artificial character.
2. Personality traits
In psychology, personality can be described in terms of the so-called Big Five: five different traits that people do or don’t possess. These are: introvert-extravert, …., …., …., ….. Assign scores, or just choose a few extremes that best describe the persona.
3. History
Where did the persona grow up? What education did he get? Were there any life-changing events? How did the persona end up in the position he currently occupies?
4. Non-relevant details
Favorite color, animal music? Favorite food? Typical holiday? Brands? What kind of pizza does he order? What kind of clothes does he wear? What does he do when nobody’s looking? Biggest secret?
Although these questions are not directly relevant for later use of the persona, they are fun to answer and they really help to get from a vague idea to an almost real person.
5. Items/inventory
Spend some imaginative money to buy imaginative items for your persona. Does he own an ipod? A car (what make, what color, …)? A cat?
6. Social environment
Does your persona have many friends? Who are they? Where do they meet? Is your persona involved in any kind of volunteering? What is his role in a team?
7. Visualize
Draw a picture describing the persona. This does not necessarily have to be a picture of the persona itself. Sometimes people can be better described by metaphors, or shapes, any visualization works.
8. Ask what-ifs
How would your persona react in case of an emergency? What would he do if he won the jackpot? Would he get angry if [think of something nasty here]? Etc.
Especially the non-relevant questions help in transforming your vague idea into a really interesting persona. This is very valuable at a later stage, when questions are asked such as ‘what would this persona do if he were faced with task A and product X’?
Did you find communicating all this to your team members worthwhile? I never considered the persona it self very valuable, the only value you really get is getting you’r team to set them up. Which requires the hard work of actually talking to your users.
Christina Wodkte in her book on personas makes it absolutely clear not to go over-done. Which to me looks like most of these points are.
8 : Very interesting, but it is always hard to predict what a user will do in the future, its best to find what he has done (never ask the future), and thinking in terms of what persona will do in the future is very risky.
http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/11/14/crappy-personas-vs-robust-personas/
Hi Bojhan,
Thanks for your comments!
Yes, I think all this can be very valuable (but not for every project). There can be a huge distance between developers and users, and personas certainly help in getting a connection. The techniques I describe here work best for projects with a long development phase. In that case you can start with a few raw personas and gradually add detail. The ‘fun part’ of working with personas is at least as valuable as the practical value. When your team starts joking about them, or loving them, or hating them, you’ll know they have come to live
Of course, as with any other technique, there are many cases when personas don’t have much added value (for example when you have real users readily available).