Personas, Profiles, Actors, & Roles - Jeff Patton

Patton Tutorial Proposal: Modeling Users
Personas, Profiles, Actors, & Roles
Modeling users to target successful product design
Summary & Participant Benefit
Leveraging what you understand about your application’s
users is central to a user centered design approach. User
personas have been touted as solution for improving the
quality of user experience. But what exactly is a persona
How doe you create one And, how does a persona differ
from other popular approaches to modeling users such as
actors, user roles, or user profiles
In this tutorial you’ll how user models fit into a holistic user
centered design process. You’ll learn about various types of
user models. Through discussion and practice you’ll learn
how to create simple role models, user profiles, and personas.
You’ll learn how to leverage these user models to identify
valuable features for your product, and overarching
characteristics the design of your product must have to be
successful for your target users.
This tutorial is fast paced, information dense, and full of
collaborative activities to give you practice with the concepts
and techniques introduced.
Target Audience
This content is accessible to anyone with past experience in software development requirements and analysis, or user centered
design approaches. Those with past experience in use case or business process modeling, where they’ve leveraged actors or user
roles, will be able to leverage past experience. Current user centered design practitioners will benefit from learning a more
flexible way of working with user models, and a more collaborative way of building them.
Tutorial Objectives
Participants will learn the purpose of user models in a user centered design approach. They will learn for different modeling
approaches, in what context each approach works best, and how to blend approaches to match their context. Finally,
participants will learn how to leverage a user model to drive feature decisions, and user interface design imperatives.
Tutorial Format
Duration: 180 minutes, 2-90 minute sessions
This tutorial is taught by alternating presentation and discussion with hands-on exercises that allow participants to learn by
doing. About 60% of tutorial time will be spent in hands-on exercises. The pace is quick and the amount of information
covered is dense, but always fun.
Participants will work together to create card based models
Information is gathered for user models through collaboratin.
Jeff Patton, jpatton@acm.org, www.agileproductdesign.com 1 of 3

Patton Tutorial Proposal: Modeling Users
A simple process is described for moving from basic user
understanding to a full features personas and product implications
Example user profiles and personas help participants envision the
final outcome
Tutorial Handouts
Handouts will include step-by-step instructions for the techniques discussed. The text will be an early release of material in a
forthcoming book on the subject of collaborative card modeling.
Tutorial Outline
Session One: Creating Simple User Models
90 minutes
Goals
• Understand the where user models fit in a user centered design approach
• Understand Actors, Roles, Profiles, and Personas as for simple categorizations of user models
• Understand how one user model can evolve into another based on the project needs
Exercises
• User role Modeling
• User role profiling
Session Two: Leveraging User Models
90 minutes
Goals:
• Understand why and how to communicate user models within your organization
• Leverage user models to identify product feature opportunities
• Leverage user models to identify necessary product design characteristics
Exercises
• Persona poster creation
• Feature and design imperative identification
Jeff Patton, jpatton@acm.org, www.agileproductdesign.com 2 of 3

Patton Tutorial Proposal: Modeling Users
Author Bio: Jeff Patton | jpatton@acm.org | 801.910.7908
Since 2000, Jeff Patton has
championed the incorporation
of User Centered Design
thinking into traditional and
Agile software development
approaches. Through writing,
teaching, speaking, and practice Jeff works to introduce
developers, analysts, product managers, and others to simple
techniques to help them incorporate UCD thinking and
techniques into their day-to-day work practices. Jeff has
found that incorporating user-centric thinking along with
traditional requirements development and testing practices
drives toward the ultimate goal of better software for endusers
and more profitable software for those who pay for its
design and development.
Since 2004 Jeff has been a consultant with ThoughtWorks
working in a wide variety of domains from healthcare to
stock portfolio management. Within TW Jeff has helped
build the recognition of user-centric thinking as a critical
success factor in their Agile projects. This type of thinking
has been “baked in” to ThoughtWorks QuickStart Analysis
approach.
To help build awareness of the subject of Agile development,
User Centered Design and usability, in 2004 Jeff started the
Agile-Usability discussion group hosted by Yahoo Groups.
At over 1,300 members, the group keeps a running dialog on
the subject, and helps provide a starting point for those
interested in getting help applying UCD and usability
practices on Agile projects.
Jeff is currently a columnist for StickyMinds.com and IEEE
Software. He’s at work on the forthcoming book “Agile
Development Outside-In” which published by Addison-
Wesley in Cockburn & Highsmith’s Agile Development
series.
Website including writing, past presentations, and blog: www.agileproductdesign.com
Past Presentation Experience
Although this is a new tutorial, it leverages content and card modeling approaches I’ve used for years in past tutorials I’ve been
presenting tutorials and workshops, participating in panel discussions and delivering short invited talks since 2002. The
following is a list of past conferences I’ve participated in:
• XP Universe ’02, ‘04: practitioner report, tutorial
presenter
• OOPSLA ‘02, ’04, ’05, ’06 and ‘07: practitioner reports,
panelist, tutorial presenter
• Constantine & Lockwood’s ForUse ’02 & ’03: tutorial
presenter, panelist, invited presenter
• Agile Development Conference ‘03. ’04, ’05, ’06, and
‘07: practitioner report, workshop presenter, tutorial
presenter
• PLoP ’03, ‘04: paper author, workshop presenter
• UPA ‘04, & ’05: tutorial presenter, workshop presenter,
panelist
• CHI 2006: panelist
• Dr. Dobb’s Architecture & Design World ’06 & ’07:
tutorial presenter
• SD Best Practices 2007: Tutorial presenter
• Ajax Experience 2006: presenter
• Spring Experience 2006: presenter
• UIE 11, 2006: tutorial presenter, speaker
• XP Day London, 2007: keynote speaker, tutorial
presenter
• Better Software Agile Development Conference 2007:
tutorial presenter
In addition to formal presentation at conferences, training on this subject, in various forms, has been presented at several
private companies.
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Jeff Patton, jpatton@acm.org, www.agileproductdesign.com 3 of 3