User profiles. Personas

USER PROFILES
Grau en Enginyeria Informàtica
User Centred Design
http://www.grihotools.udl.cat/mpiua/
perfil-de-usuario-tecnica-personas

Introduction
• user profile
• A detailed description of your users’ attributes (job title,
experience, level of education, key tasks, age range, etc.).
• These characteristics will typically reflect a range, not a single
attribute (e.g., ages 18–35).
• Your users should fall within those ranges.
• A user profile will help you understand who you are building
your product for, and will help you when recruiting for future
usability activities.
If you do not understand who your users
(or potential users) are, your product is
doomed to failure.
User Profiles - User Centred Design 2 / 31

Introduction
• The first step in understanding your users is to
.
• Once you have developed a thorough user profile, you
can develop
(exemplars of your end user): are designed
to help keep specific users in focus during design
discussions
&
(a day-in-the-life of your end user): help
you test your system and to build functionality into your
product that users will actually want to use.

Comparison of user profiles, personas,
and scenarios
UnderstandingYourUsers.Apracticalguidetouserrequirements
C.Courage&K.Baxter
Elsevier(2005)

Important
• NOT focus only on the “best” or “most experienced” users
• Consider a range of users to ensure that the product will
work for 80% of potential population

How to create a User Profile
• Steps:
1. Finding information to build your user profile
2. Understanding the types of users
3. Creating the user profile
• Vital to get the right users …
• But who are your users?
• What are their goals?
• For example, the typical users might be between 18 and
35 years of age, have job titles like “Travel Specialist,”
“Travel Agent,” or “Travel Assistant,” and work for travel
agencies with fewer than 50 employees.

Creating a user Profile, an
ITERATIVE PROCESS
Understanding Your Users. A practical guide to user requirements
C. Courage & K. Baxter
Elsevier (2005)

How to create a User Profile.
Step 1: Finding information to build your user profile
• Initial information to build your user profile can be
obtained from:
• Product managers
• Functional specifications
• Industry analysts
• Marketing studies
• Market analysts
• Customer support
• Competitive benchmarking and analysis
• Census bureau
• Surveys

Step 2: Understanding the types of users
• All the users are ...

• Define what you mean by “user.”
• Most people consider the individuals who will interact
directly with the product as their users, but you may need
to consider other individuals as well:
• The manager of your direct user
• The system administrator who configures the product for
the direct user
• People who receive artifacts or information from the
system
• People deciding whether they will purchase your
software
• People who use competitors’ products (and you want to
convert them to your users)
stakeholders

• Try to categorize your users into one of three categories:
• Primary users are those individuals who work regularly or directly
with the product.
• Secondary users will use the product infrequently or through an
intermediary.
• Tertiary users are those who are affected by the system or the
purchasing decision-makers.
• This does not mean that you have to conduct user
requirements activities with the secondary and tertiary
users, but you should at least know who they are.

Step 3: Creating the user profile
• Demographic characteristics.
Age, gender, location, socio-
economic status
• Occupation experience. Current
job title, years at the company,
years of experience at that position,
responsibilities, previous jobs and
job titles
• Company information. Company
size, industry
• Education. Degree, major, courses
taken
• Computer experience. Computer
skills, years of experience
• Specific product experience.
Experience with competitors’
products or other domain-specific
products, usage trends
• Tasks. Primary tasks, secondary
tasks
• Domain knowledge. The users’
understanding of the product area
• Technology available. Computer
hardware (monitor size, computing
speed, etc.), software, other tools
typically used
• Attitudes and values. Product
preferences, fear of technology, etc.
• Learning style. Visual learner,
audio learner, etc.
• Criticality of errors. In general, the
possible consequences of a user’s
error.

• Example

• Once you determine the range of responses for each of
the characteristics and the percentage of users along that
range, you will want to categorize your users into
groups based on their similarities.
• Some groupings you may use are:
• Age (child, young adult, adult, older, etc.)
• Experience (novice, expert)
• Attitudes (first adopters, technophobe)
• Primary task(s) (buyer, seller)

PERSONAS

Personas. The origin
• Ancient Greek: Persona = Mask
• In large open air theatres, classical masks
(personas) were able to
.
• In poetry and fiction, authors often create a 2nd-
self thorow whom they tell the story
• It presents a clear perspective of the events of the story

Personas
The Inmates are Running The Asylum
Alan Cooper (1999)
• First to use “personas” as a technique with
the objective:
• To avoid pitfalls
• To give the development team a shared
understanding of the real users in terms of goals,
capabilities and context.

Personas
• Personas are not real people, but they represent them
throughout the design process.
• They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users.
• Although they are imaginary, they are defined with
significant rigor and precision.
• A persona is simply
.
• We cannot speak with every end user, then we create a
model that can represent those end users.

Benefits of Personas
• Personas give your users life and help team members
feel connected to them
• All team members think about the same persona
• instead of each individual working towards his/her own vision of
who the end user is
• Without a specific target to focus on, “the user” can
change from the expert to the novice to your grandmother,
all in the midst of a single conversation
• A persona can be used in meetings as a discussion tool in
cognitive walkthroughs, storyboarding, role-playing, and
other usability activities
• e.g., “Mary would never use that feature”
• Personas can also help new team members quickly learn
who the end user is

Persona stories
• One of the primary goals of personas is to create
empathy and motivation for the team. Personas do this
by allowing us to connect emotionally with other
individuals rather than abstract collections such as “users”
or “SingleTicketPurchasers”
User Profiles - User Centred Design
To be Agile we need minimal, collaborative
personas
• Minimal. Each primary persona requires a
different user interface
• Collaborative. Agile is collaborative at
heart. The core team should be involved
in the user research required for
personas –at least as observers– and
must be actively involved in the
development of personas
20 / 31

To Be Aware of (when Creating Personas)
1. To develop multiple personas for each user type will
help to cover the range of characteristics for each user
type
• However, should keep the set of personas manageable. It is a
balancing act.
• If you have too many personas to represent one user type, they will
simply blur together in everyone’s mind and diminish their benefits.
• Three primary personas is a common recommendation
2. Not all users use all parts of a product or system
• Therefore, it is unrealistic to assume that the same persona will
work for all parts of your product
3. Personas should never replace conducting usability
activities with your end users

Creating a Persona
• Details will come from the information in your user profile.
• When creating a persona, it should be fictional but
describe attributes from real users.
• Provide details and maintain authenticity.
• Components, ideal list :
• Identity
• Status
• Goals
• Skill set
• Tasks
• Relationships
• Requirements
• Expectations
• Photograph

• A user profile/persona should include:
• Name
• Occupation
• Age
• Gender
• Education
• Personas assist in decision making
• It’s very helpful to be able to refer back to the personas when functionality and requirements questions
come up.
• Being able to say
• “Susan – our realtor, might have trouble if we implement it that way.”
• Based on our profile we know that Susan has little Web experience and has trouble with searching for information.
• How many personas should be used?
• There is no magic number. You want enough profiles to represent a wide range of users, but not so
many that they overcomplicate the development process.
• Generally 2 – 4 profiles will do the trick. It is not necessary to create profiles for every distinct user
group or scenario.
• User Profiles & Scenarios
• User personas can be used in conjunction with user scenarios to offer a comprehensive picture of a
sample user and their interaction with the site. In some instances these documents are combined so
that the persona offers the users bio and sample scenarios. This is a more advanced, but effective
approach.
FONT: http://www.fatpurple.com/2010/02/26/web-user-profiles-user-personas
Creating a Persona
• Computing and Web experience
• Personal Web behavior patterns (how do they use the Web in their personal time)
• How they will use the site
• Any additional site specific demographics (e.g. a Newspaper site might find lifestyle,
location, race, etc. important)
• Stock photo (putting a face to a name)
23 / 31

Creating a Persona
http://www.smartinsights.com/marketplace-
analysis/customer-analysis/web-design-personas
RECOMENDED
• http://www.uie.com/articles/benefits_of_personas
• http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/goal-oriented-
design/about-personas
• http://thinkvitamin.com/design/how-to-understand-your-users-
with-personas

Personas. Examples.
http://www.user.com/downloads/Sample-persona-from-Interaction-Design.pdf
http://www.uiaccess.com/accessucd/personas_eg.html

Personas.
Examples

Personas. Examples

http://taehok.com/night/?page_id=56

http://personas.dk/wp-
content/LOWRES-Personas-
english-version-oktober-
200821.pdf

http://www.uxpassion.com/blog/strategy-concepts/what-is-roletailored-user-experience-
in-nav-2009-part-1

Other useful information
• http://www.interaction-
design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html
PERSONA TEMPLATE:
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/ux/appli
cations/uxd/assets/templates/user-
persona-template.pdf
USER PROFILE TEMPLATE:
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/ux/appli
cations/uxd/assets/templates/user-profile-
template.pdf
http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/ux/applications/uxd/process.html
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User profiles. Personas

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