This document provides a lighthearted guide to creating personas for design purposes. It recommends starting simply by drawing a basic picture of a person and making up basic details like their name, wants, and context. It then suggests supplementing this initial fiction with real data from website analytics, user profiles, and academic research to extrapolate behavior and personality trends. The key messages are that personas do not need to be perfectly accurate, instinct and confidence in one's design abilities are important, and personas are primarily used to help designers see from another perspective rather than to perfectly represent users.

1. Filthy people
A cheat’s guide to personas

2. Default to default
• Hey! It’s powerpoint!
• Rule 1 = don’t even bother with presentation.
• Do it quick. With what ever you have to hand.

3. Ready, steady, … Stop.
• Don’t do anything.
• THINK BEFORE YOU ACT
– Why do you want a persona?
– Who cares?
– What difference will it make?
– Where are you even going with this thinking…
– When are you going to teach us something?

4. ACT! … NOW!
• Draw a person.
• Who is she / he?
• What does it want?
• Why does it want it?
• When is it going to need it /get it / look for it?
• Where. --------- Don’t forget where.

5. OK. So were not done yet.
• What makes a good persona?
– Instinct
– Personality
– Fact
– Fiction.

6. FACT!
• U hazstatz.
– Web stats
• Extrapolate behaviour
– Profile information
• Extrapolate personality
– General stats
• Extrapolate context
– Plagiarism
• Raid academic research – extrapolate everything.

7. HERE’S A PUPPY . . .

9. Personality
• People relate to images.
– Illustrate
– Describe
– Add life

10. Illustrate

11. Describe, add life.

12. FICTION
• What you don’t know. Invent.
• Close your eyes. Think of someone (no, not like
that) Who is using your product. Describe them.
• Who isn’t? Describe them.
• You can’t be wrong. (WHA?)

13. You Can’t Be Wrong.
• Design for someone. Anyone.
• Human Behaviour remarkable consistent at
most levels (e.g. Fitts Law).
• Persona’s stop you being a machine or a
content owner. Pick someone. Anyone.

14. Instinct.
• BELIEVE …
• Confidence in you design skills.
• Use your persona to answer your questions.
Trust them.

15. Thank yoooooooo :D
@LouiseHewit