1. February 27, 2013
Using Personas
to Improve your User Experience

2. February 27, 2013
Hi!
!
My Name is Boriss
I’m on the Mozilla User Experience Team

3. February 27, 2013
Our focus is on how Mozilla’s products and services
are perceived, learned, and used

4. February 27, 2013
tl;dr: User experience is a back and forth process
between:
1. The needs of users
2. Innovation based on those needs

5. February 27, 2013
If only the users’ current needs are considered...
!
“We ask users what they want and we’ll
build that.”

6. February 27, 2013
Ask users what they want and then build it?
Cool, let’s do that!
except....

7. This only addresses current problems, so your
solutions will be limited to current problems

8. Users are experts in what bothers them, but not
why it bothers them nor what the solution is
!

9. “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted,
they’d have said a faster horse.”
!
- attributed to Henry Ford, but who knows

10. Can lead to just “averaging” needs:
building to fix individual problems rather than
with an overall vision of the product
!

11. February 27, 2013
Grey
“What’s your favorite color?”

12. February 27, 2013
Ok, so how do we build products real user needs?

13. February 27, 2013
First, know your users.
• What are they trying to accomplish?
!
• What are their metrics of success?
Productivity, creativity, accomplishment,
better communication, fun?
!
• Oh, and... who are they?

14. February 27, 2013
A common problem app developers face is
unknowingly designing for:
• Their features and capabilities
• Themselves
• Everyone
• Their mom

15. February 27, 2013
To avoid falling in this trap, create a persona!
!
Personas are fictional, archetypal users that
represent the needs of larger groups of users

16. February 27, 2013
To avoid falling in this trap, create a persona!
!
They act as ‘stand-ins’ for real users and help guide
decisions about functionality and design

17. February 27, 2013
!
Personas have specific attributes as people and
needs as users. They should be “real” enough to
talk about and design for
!

18. February 27, 2013
Personas are useful for:
!
Giving the team a shared point of reference for
design (much better than everyone’s mom)

19. February 27, 2013
Personas are useful for:
!
Tying the usage and design of the product to real
human needs, not just features

20. February 27, 2013
Personas are useful for:
!
Focusing the scope of design on particular kinds of
users, rather than “all users”