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Aug

2008

Three Important Benefits of Personas

www.uie.com/...benefits_of_personas

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personas persona profile benefit effect application

Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space.
While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.
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- Any tools that help designers prevent the natural behavior of grounding helps them attack the design more objectively, with their target user in mind.
- Benefit #1: Preventing Grounding with Personas
- Personas are model users that the team creates to help understand the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people who will use the interface. The persona represents behavior patterns, helping the designer understand the flow of the user's day and how the interface will fit into it.
- Benefit #2: The Oral Tradition Lives On
- The team members had made up lives for these people, usually based on the actual observations they made when they studied real users. They constantly used these imaginary lives to relate important stories about how these users would interact with the proposed designs.
- Using just the oral tradition, the stories become distorted with every new telling. Many of the teams prevented this distortion by capturing the stories along with the persona descriptions.
- Benefit #3: The Role Personas Play in Role Playing
- From an early age, we use role playing as a way to safely explore the world around us. By pretending to be different people, we can try things out from their perspective, seeing if their viewpoint is different from our own
- When we adopt a role, we can start to view the world around us from that person's perspective. Using the persona as the target role, we can identify how that person will interact with the design and the issues that will arise.
- To get the benefits, the personas have to have rich, relevant detail. They need to accurately represent the users the team is aiming for.
- The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come.