Practitioners-Guide-User-Experience-Design

Creating Portraits of Your Users
Personas are representative descriptions of your users that you create based on data
collected in your surveys and interviews. If you’re working on an existing product, or one
to serve the users of another product your company offers, you can also find some
valuable information for personas in your product’s or company’s usage statistics, such as
how many and of what profile access one particular part of the product versus another.
Personas cover specifics of behaviors, such as commuting, exercising, mobile use, or what
users find entertaining; general demographics, such as income, age, familiarity with
technology, location, and occupation; and scenarios common to the user base, such as
searching for an item to compare prices, watching a TV series, or tracking how much meat
one eats.
If I had taken the time to make up detailed personas for the WSJ Live app, I would
have learned sooner the ways users interacted with the video content, the other apps they
might have been exposed to, and the times they’d be most likely to engage with the
product. My mistake was making an app for someone too much like me.
I don’t know about you, but when I think of a Wall Street Journal user, here’s who I
don’t think of: a twentysomething freshly moved to Brooklyn with upward of $30,000 in
student loan debt. His daily routine begins with rolling out of bed around eight thirty to
check his iPhone for any missed texts or alerts from the staggering number of apps he’s
downloaded. Afterward he moseys down to the local cafe for some iced coffee because it’s
summer and the air conditioner is on the fritz. Upon returning to his apartment he hops on
his Apple MacBook Pro and begins browsing through Twitter to see what’s been
happening in the worlds of tech, science, food, music, and design. Checking email is also
part of his morning routine, but there’s typically not much to respond to because at this
time of day the only new emails are from daily deal sites. After that, he heads into
Manhattan on bike to stalk coworking spaces and hunt for startup jobs.
What I just described was me fresh out of college, and I was very much not the
audience I was designing for. I learned the value of personas to quickly tell the story of an
actual user. I’ve found they are very useful in helping me to keep focus on the user, rather
than getting caught up in some feature I’ve become infatuated by. They aid in thinking
through the different scenarios that people are using my products in and then conjuring up
ideas about ways I can make their day better. Personas transform users from abstract
entities into vivid, multidimensional beings.
So what makes for a really useful persona? There are many formats used, and you
can find lots of examples and templates on the web. But here is one I use that gives you a
feel for a good format to use and the level of specificity to aim for. I find it’s important to
include a photograph, and you can either take one of a colleague or friend who fits the
persona or find one online among the wealth of photographs posted.
When I joined the Wall Street Journal several personas had already been created. We
knew that readers liked to talk about what section a story appeared in and that many of
them liked to read every single story each day. One reason for this is the social capital in
being able to say they read the story that appeared on B1—the first page of the Business
and Finance section—in the Journal that morning. Knowing this led us to structure