Using Personas in Design
Personas are all the rage in human experience design. What are they, and how do you use them? What are the advantages of using personas in the design process?
Think of a persona as an archetypical character in a play. In fact the word persona comes from the masks used in ancient Greek plays. The settings of the play are the environments in which your design will be used. Your design is an important prop which helps the character achieve his or her goals in the play.
You see, a persona is essentially a fake person that represents a group of your users. Personas help you keep your designs human-focused. That’s a good thing right?
It’s important to craft your personas well. I use the word archetype, because the persona is an abstraction of a group of shared characteristics. You need research (oh no!) to make good personas - otherwise you are making a SWAG (sophisticated wild-ass guess). You need to understand your audiences.
I would suggest that you make each persona … well … personal. Give the persona a realistic name, demographic, and psychographic info. Also, you need to understand your marginal audiences.
In finance, very wealthy clients are a minority, but they represent a huge and disproportionate amount of assets. They also tend to do things very differently. While high net-worth customers may represent 2% of total customers, they may represent 50% of a financial services company’s business. Don’t ignore them.
So, when you are working through a design, you can say “what would Dianne Frederick want to do with this feature” instead of talking about the abstract user. (Dianne Frederick is the persona, in case you missed it.)
