The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (Paperback)

~ (Author), Ziv Yaar (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

How do we ensure that our Web sites actually give users what they need? What are the best ways to understand our users' goals, behaviors, and attitudes, and then turn that understanding into business results? Personas bring user research to life and make it actionable, ensuring we're making the right decisions based on the right information. This practical guide explains how to create and use personas to make your site more successful. The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You'll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.

About the Author

Steve Mulder is principal consultant at Molecular, an Internet consulting firm in Boston, and an internationally known speaker recognized for his work with personas. He’s a user experience expert who practices what he preaches, with over ten years of experience in user research, information architecture, interaction design, and usability. Ziv Yaar is the vice president of Internet strategy at Molecular, where he has spent over ten years helping companies develop technology and business strategies and has been at the forefront of merging the power of marketing analytics with personas.

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: New Riders Press; 1 edition (August 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321434536
• ISBN-13: 978-0321434531
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #245,142 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What would "Bob" do?, October 4, 2006

By	Thomas Duff "Duffbert" (Portland, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

When creating a web site, it's very easy to fall into the trap of designing it for yourself. Unfortunately, you're not the typical user in most cases, nor are you the intended audience. You can avoid this problem with the use of "personas". The subject is covered very well in this book.

User-driven design means that you focus on what the user needs in a system instead of designing features because they're "cool". Personas are imaginary users of your system that you keep in mind while designing how the application will work. But it's much more than just picking a name like Bob and then coding away...

This book goes into the process of interviewing the user base of your proposed application, determining the needs and abilities of that base. A system that is to be used by computer-savvy accountants will not have the same look and feel as a system that is intended for your grandmother. By conducting these interviews and consolidating the results, the designer can get a good idea as to what a typical user will look like. That information is then used to create a number of personas, or fictitious people who will be the target audience. These personas come complete with names, pictures, and a background. Then instead of building features based on how you feel about them, you look at the feature through the eyes of "Bob", based on his attitudes, experience, and personality. It's like having a user available to you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The User Is Always Right takes you through the steps necessary to understand the audience for your system, as well as how to make that audience "real" in terms of individual people. The authors do a nice job in making the process clear and understandable, and by the end you can start building your imaginary friends with confidence. The process outlined here is one that you wouldn't necessarily use for every project, as you could spend days gathering and distilling the data you collect. But the concepts they present, once understood, will allow you to build your "Bob"s even with small systems. Then armed with that knowledge, you can anticipate answers to the question "what would Bob do?"

So... If you are tired of designing really cool systems (to you) that don't ever seem to get used, it may be because you missed the real users. Give the persona technique a try, and I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at how it affects your development.

Besides, how else could you actually be commended for inviting and talking to imaginary friends?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic, well-written book on user research and persona creation for interaction designers, September 22, 2007

By	William K. Evans IV "sousticefire" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This comprehensive guide approaches user experience research like never before, and is well-written, easy-to-read, and quite user friendly. It provides real-world examples of how user research is done in just enough detail that it can both inform an executive of the role of usability research as well as introduce methodology for persona creation to someone starting out in user experience design.

"You are not the user."

As an interaction designer and information architect for the past 12 years, I have been most drawn towards books that go far beyond principles and theory to ones I can actually extract from and use their contents for the praxis of the craft, rather than just reading descriptions of a process. This is a great book that is a blueprint to follow to get it right. It defines the entire user research and persona creation process and offers insightful case studies from successful companies that Mulder and Yaar worked with like Vista Print.

The use of personas has become an increasingly popular technique being used by the interaction design community to address user needs. Introduced into the mainstream in 1999 in The Inmates Are Running The Asylum, personas have gained momentum in both the software and website design communities, but still faces hurdles.

What are the benefits of personas?

A key aspect to any practitioner responsible for bringing real user centered design to an organization's product design process, being able to evangelize the importance of user research and persona creation is absolutely key. Many interaction designers understand the importance of persona creation, but lack the arguments to persuade management to both fund user research and persona creation, and to incorporate real users into the design process. This is where the book is particular important - selling proper user research and persona creation to upper management constrained by resources and deadlines.

According to Mulder and Yaar, personas bring many benefits, including these:
* Users' goals, behaviors and attitudes become a common point of focus for the team. (They keep repeating this mantra until I found myself chanting it in the shower)
* The team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many users.
* By always asking, "Would Will use this?" the team can avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use, or the problem which is far more pernicious - building features that a product champion thinks are important.
* Design efforts can be prioritized based on the personas.
* Disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas.
* Designs can be constantly evaluated against the personas, getting better designs into usability testing.

What is a persona anyway??

A persona is a fictional person that the team creates to reflect what is know about one of the key audience groups (sometimes that knowledge is gained from interviews, focus groups, or surveys). Typically, a team creates two or more personas to represent different user segments, while identifying a few key archetypes as the primary personas.

Helpful persona profiles include demographic information, levels of computer expertise, descriptions of the personas' needs for the particular site in development, and the goals and tasks they would have in mind when using the site.

The User Is Always Right takes you through each step of persona creation, including tips for conducting qualitative user research, new ways to apply quantitative research (such as surveys) to persona creation, various methods for generating persona segmentation, and proven techniques for making personas realistic. You'll also learn how to use personas effectively, from directing overall business strategy and prioritizing features and content to making detailed decisions about information architecture, content, and design.

What characteristics are included in a persona?

Some of the information Mulder and Yaar say a persona usually includes:
* a name and picture
* demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
* job title and major responsibilities
* goals and tasks in relation to your product/web site/application
* environment (physical, social, technological)
* a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance for your site
* A narrative that brings the persona to life

The User Is Always Right is an entertaining and clearly written book that is also filled with great insight into the process, both qualitative, and quantitative, of creating user personas based on real research and how that can help interaction designers, product designers, and other user experience professionals make more usable and useful software. There are also extensive samples and examples throughout the book of real personas, actual user research data, and analysis spreadsheets. These give a very clear idea of how the recommended approaches work in practice.

For the first time (as far as I'm aware), this brings together two very different approaches: qualitative research based on interviews and observation; and quantitative research based on surveys and usage data. The authors' overall methodology provides real answers on when to use field research, when to conduct surveys, and how to combine the two sets of results. The end product are personas that have much greater rigueur and impact.

In summary, this is a must-have book for people tackling the design of complex sites, applications or devices, or for user-centered designers seeking more rigorous methodologies when creating personas. I cannot recommend this book too highly.

5.0 out of 5 stars Serious about user centric web design? Read and keep within reach., September 21, 2008

By	Allan Tan "Lihong Property" (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Comprehensive in-depth guide to creating personas using quantitative and qualitative techniques. Well written. No fluff. Note that creating personas requires significant resources, so small businesses would be less likely to develop them. Nevertheless, this book provides valuable insights for anyone serious about developing user centric web sites. If only more "practical guides" were like this one.