Jeremy and Karen are personas representing a married couple with 4 kids aged 3-12. Jeremy works in insurance and Karen works in a building society. They have a combined high salary and live in the suburbs. Karen is socially active and involved with the kids' activities while Jeremy focuses more on work but catches up with the kids on weekends. The document discusses debates around the usefulness of personas and provides three techniques for building personas through user interviews: the fishbowl, empathy map, and pain/gain map.

1. ThePersonaExpress
RickMonro / @monro

2. First Name:
Live & work in:
Originally trained as:
Favourite city visited:
Best movie of all time:
The Persona Express | UX Scotland
draw a pic
if you like
what you studied
or qualified in
anywhere,
near or far
where you
call home
Make a simple trading card for yourself, we’ll come back to it later.

3. Depending on what you read, personas are either needless puffery...

4. ...or a vital mainstay of an effective UX design process

5. personas = cheesy stock photography?

6. bulls**t personas = cheesy stock photography

7. Background
• Both professionals – Jeremy and Karen
• Jeremy works in insurance and Jane in a building society
• They have 4 kids aged between aged between 3 and 12
• Their kids are the centre of their lives
Demographics
• Male and Female
• 35 - 50
• £130,000+ (combined salary)
• Suburban
Qualities
• Energetic, still “feel young”
• Good balance between work and home life; enjoy the outdoors
but equally spend a lot of time on phone and email
• Karen spends a lot of time out socialising and playing an active
role with the kids – swimming, football, drama
• Jeremy is more involved with work and spends the weekend
catching up with the kids
Do people matching this even exist?

8. …it is more important
that a persona be
precise than accurate
”
“
The original source, “The Inmates Are Running The Asylum”, Alan Cooper 1998

9. a flight simulator for
your designs when
they're still on paper
”
“
...and another take on personas from SXSW 2012

10. thetorment
of theUXer.
*
*okay-milddiscomfort
As UX professionals we are almost obliged to constantly question our own work

11. First Name:
Live & work in:
Originally trained as:
Favourite city visited:
Best movie of all time:
The Persona Express | UX Scotland
draw a pic
if you like
what you studied
or qualified in
anywhere,
near or far
where you
call home
Would you be happy to let someone make decision on your behalf,
based on a trading card profile? Not unlike what we do in UX!

12. 3quicktechniquestoassistwithuser
interviewsandpersonabuilding
Techniques documented in Dave Gray’s excellent Gamestorming
but using abbreviated versions due to time constraints.

13. The Fishbowl
• Based around simple discussion
• Focus on active listening
• Listen for key statements
• Based on ideas from the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory
Decision-Making
• Output: 3 quotes that characterise your conversation with
an interviewee
“”
Interviewing users, start high level and listen for key statements

14. Empathy Map
• Attributed to Dave Gray
• Original using seeing, hearing, felling, thinking & doing
• Abbreviated version using 2 categories
• What scenarios are being described?
• Best questions for interviewee may not be obvious
Thinking
Doing
This uses active listening from last round, looking for scenarios

15. Pain/Gain Map
Pains
Gains
• Attributed to Dave Gray
• Sheds light on motivations & decisions
• More specific, precise findings
• Specific difficulties & challenges
• Points to solutions & opportunities
Getting increasingly specific now. What’s actionable from what you hear?

16. Outcomes
• How do the techniques affect conversations with interviewees?
• How do the answers change based on the outputs required?
• What technique produces the most useful information?
In a short space of time, with access to limited users, we can try various
approaches and take learnings from each interview to inform the next.
Try and then review results; ask things like:

17. Thankyou!