how useful are personas in different dev environments?
DESCRIPTION
I have spent 20 years in the design field. A few times, I relied on personas to help me creating better designs. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes, they were less efficient. With the raise of the Lean UX and the "job to be done" theory, I am looking at the variants on the personas theme, and what are the pros and cons of each, and what make them appropriate for a given context.TRANSCRIPT
Should we kill personas?Marine Barbaroux - @miss_embe
Head of UX, Red Gate
30 Apr 2014
image: hugh mcleod - @gapidvoid
image: Ben Melbourne - @benmel
1) the "cooper"
• Designed to create empathy.• Requires research up front. • They are not aligned with
MKT personas (MKT comes after design)
• Sometimes, they were not credible because they use irrelevant details
• They are hard to keep up to date
• They REQUIRE CUSTOMERS to be designed.
2) the Lean UX ad-Hoc (or proto) personas
image: Jeff Gothelf
• Designed to create alignement in the team.
• Assumes the customer is an hypothesis like the others.
• Quicker to do, but can be very wrong, so you need to check your model exists --> there are many more things to check.
• Complexify hypothesis (don't know if your product or customers is wrong).
images: @alanklement
3) No persona: Job stories instead of User stories
• Based on the "Job to Be Done" theory.
• Claims personas are reduced to demographics that don’t acknowledge causality.
• Decouple implementation with motivations and outcomes.
• Bring more context, situations and anxiety.
image: (c) 1993 Steve McConnell
... but fundametaly, are they so different?
image: @miss_embe
product maturity
cust
omer
bas
e/co
mpa
ny s
ize
ad-hoc persona
persona
JTBD
timeline
• These tools are complementary• Always keep an eye on your users/customers• Keep an eye on their enviroment too: it might change their goals• It doesn't matter what persona artifacts look like• Understand the forces that drive your users/customers• Modify your views and product accordingly
conclusion
www.cooper.com/journal/2014/04/barry-the-blog-post
asinthecity.com/2011/05/13/explaining-personas-used-in-ux-design----part-1/
asinthecity.com/2011/05/13/explaining-personas-used-in-ux-design----part-2/
www.udemy.com/ultimate-guide-to-ux/#/lecture/209590
www.jeffgothelf.com/blog/using-personas-for-executive-alignment/
jobstobedone.org/
insideintercom.io/using-job-stories-design-features-ui-ux/
Understanding the job by C.Christensen: www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84LymEs67Y
references