Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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?

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.

It is clearly one of the best books on webdesign, a compulsory one on any IA's or IxD's bookshelf.


What I liked:
- the insights this book gives you are instantly actionable, it is really a step-by-step guide
- the authors discuss the topics that are relevant to persona creation (and take it literally, there is great information on survey design, how to segment results, what sources to use to find a photo for your persona, etc.)
- you will find good real world examples
- the book shows multiple approaches based on different needs and constraints
- the copywriting is also outstanding, no nonsense and easy to digest

What I didn't like:
I am trying hard but really can't think of anything :)

I recently finished Steve Mulder's book and today, I had the privilege of seeing him speak at Web Design World 2006 in Boston. His approach to capturing the essence of users and taking this knowledge all the way through design and marketing, into strategic business decisions not only makes good sense: one wonders how much of a web-based operation is pure luck without taking this framework into consideration.

Mulder presents various options depending on the level of time and investment you can afford to make, ranging from strictly qualitative approaches that take relatively little to gather user data and come up with some form of segmentation, to all-out statistically-loaded qualitative studies with the end goal of defining a user as clearly as possible, giving him/her a name, traits, goals and a whole personality that your organization can relate to.

After personas have been defined, the book helps you use them to drive decision making about site structure, content and design, so as to ensure success getting the users they represent to accomplish their goals, while you make your company money. This makes this book a must-read for all people involved in the early stages of conceptualizing for a web site design or redesign, whether you are a designer, product manager or simply in charge of changes to a web site.

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.

I really liked this book as it provided lots of templates, instructions and examples of how to create personas, without making them seem too complicated and difficult.

A great book for those just getting into personas and also those who want to develop them further.

Easy reading and very practical reference for user research and using personaes in design and planning. Paid itself back in less then week through a consultancy job :)

It delivers how to know user's thoughts and express it in effective way to others. And also remind me a lot of thing I know already but I forgot while working.Good for someone who interested in user experience design.

This book has got to be one of the most comprehensive on the topic of personas available. Between the detailed types of personas and processes on when and how to use them, it's almost overwhelming in scope for such a relatively small book.

The power of this book is the amount of experience the authors have in the subject. Where other books may make a cursory review of personas and how to apply them, this one makes clear delineations of the two types it describes (qualitative and quantitative) and how/when they should be used and their limitations. Examples and discussions of successful projects as well as when "personas are taken too far" distill a lot of practical experience.

This book is for the serious UI/usability designer/developer. Though it is not so technical as to be over the heads of executives, managers and stakeholders, once past the first chapter the details are likely to be more than most will need.

When companies want to skimp in a development process, whether that be for a web application, a desktop application, a content management implementation, a usability project, or a documentation set, the first thing they'll cut (if they even thought of it at all) is doing persona development. They'll say it's not important, or that it will get captured in the scenarios (if they do those), or in the use cases - and that's if they do the types of use cases that capture user experience, not the type that simply talk about database interactions. In their book, The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar dispel all those naive notions and show how personas set a sound foundation on which to build. Skipping this step means building on what is likely an unstable foundation - and from the world of bricks and mortar, we know the steep costs associated with shoring up buildings with badly-constructed underpinnings. A great book with concrete suggestions for practitioners.