Real personas
The whole idea of using personas is to create a specific fictional character, that allows the designers and developers to explore the problem domain. One of Cooper’s points is not to use descriptions of real-life people, as theese do not contain enough aspects to describe all the design-challenges in the problem domain. According to Cooper, a primary persona, which contains all the aspects needed to meet the design challenge, should be created. In other words, Cooper wants to design for only one person.
The thoughts behind Cooper’s method are great. I can really get into the “design for one person” deal. Unfortunately, written persona descriptions are often uninspiring. The designers and developers find it hard to engage in the persona descriptions, as they are just text and nothing more. How can the text descriptions become persons “part of your team”?
They can’t. I don’t believe they can as long as they are only text and nothing more. They should be complemented with something else.
A few weeks ago, I had a chance to discuss the use of personas in an agile developer environment with an XP team leader in a large US software company with a development branch in Denmark. The XP team leader did not find the persona descriptions engaging enough to be taken serious. The about 4 different personas were reduced to two “user types” – the regular user and the administrator. The dummy and the expert.
This is what should not happen! When real-person users are reduced to types of users, or even plain “the users”, we design for too many. The user represents many real-life users, so when using the term “the user”, we are talking about all of them. This means that “the user” can do this and that to use the system. This is not right. The actual real-life user only uses the system in a narrow defined way. “The user” uses the system in all the possible ways. Instead of letting “the user” bend and stretch to fit the software program, the software program should bend and stretch to fit the needs of the “real-life user”.
The XP team leader told me that they couldn’t engage in the personas as it was the text descriptions that were uninspiring. If the developers had real-life persons to pin the personas up to, it would be much better. I suggested using video-personas, but he was still reluctant to say it would solve his problems. Together we found that it might be necessary for the developers to meet “real-life users” representing each persona, letting the developers ask questions. When this was done and development started, the developers would still constantly be confronted with fictional e-mails, posters, etc, but also excerpts of video interviews with the real life people.
On top of this, user stories from good and bad experiences with the software product should be written down to be presented later for the developers.
Kathy Sierra recently blogged about neglecting the real users. On presenting user stories to the developers she wrote:
[...]almost everyone starts to squirm when they think about a real person becoming upset with them.