Crafting the user experience with personas & scenarios

July 02, 2008 at 3:57 pm

The goal of any web application should always be aligned to the user achieving their objective(s). Users will always have a purpose in using an application, whether that's absorbing the latest news in an RSS aggregator or buying next weeks groceries; users habitually have desires and motivations behind their actions on the web. It therefore naturally makes sense to design web products to satisfy these requirements; personas and scenarios compliment one another and are great tools in the craft of user experience design in helping us develop great user experiences.

So what exactly are personas?

Personas are essentially a documented set of people that help turn the generic labeling of users into identifiable human beings that share similar behaviors and goals. The differences between one persona to another would be based around what people do by their actions and why they do them, in terms of their goals and motivations.

In creating a persona a designer would typically find a set of common behaviors and motivations through ethnographical research; typically carried out through interviewing, contextual enquiry etc. These shared motivations and behaviors derived from these types of activities would be the basis of one single persona. This fledgling persona would then be given a name, a picture and have a little demographic data attached o make the persona seem like a real person. It is always important that personas seem like credible, real people.

To give an example, imagine a web application that provided a flight booking service. A design team could identify 3 typical behaviors in air travel from their research findings: the business flyer; a flyer taking air travel occasionally for pleasure and a flyer who travels back home at the same time annually. These behaviors, although similar, have very different goals and motivations associated with them: Robert, the frequent flying businessman; Lindsay, the holidaymaker and Michelle, the snowbird, who travels annually to see her folks, for example. Thus, these different motivations would be the foundation for three separate personas.

To augment each persona I personally find adding quotes to the persona documents are a nice touch, such as (in the aforementioned example) "I fly at least once a week". As well as quotations it is also good practice to title each persona, such as "The frequent Flyer". Adding quotes and titles to the documentation also aids in distinguishing and identifying a selection of personas quickly. Fundamentally, the documents that knit the persona together should clearly detail the behaviors, motivations and goals that differentiate one persona from another. In the above example Robert really cares about making sure he gets to his business appointment on time, while Lindsay could be more relaxed about what happens after she's made her flight.

So how many personas should you create?

In the majority of cases very few personas are actually required: anywhere between one to seven would be adequate, depending on the project. After about seven it becomes difficult to remember and distinguish between them all. Further more, if you you’ve too many personas it becomes very difficult to design with them all in mind. A good rule of thumb is that if a project is deemed to require more than seven personas the application probably isn't focused enough on the core behaviors it needs to support.

However, that said, personas on their own are pretty useless; they only really come alive when they are used in conjunction with scenarios.

So what are scenarios?

Scenarios are stories about what it would be like to use an application once it has been built - they are prototypes built with words, if you like. By using a scenario a designer can place their personas within a context and bring them to life by running through a scenario with each personas created. This is where they become invaluable and can help uncover exactly what will need to be included in the final application. The following is a ficticious example scenario for an online grocery store:

David goes to his bookmarks and points his browser to his 'OnlineGroceries' account. He pulls up his order from last week and wants to use it again but wants to pull three items off the list. The total cost is adjusted. He now has all his items for this weeks order and wants it delivered this Saturday in the afternoon. He picks an appropriate delivery slot and hits the 'Deliver' button. He chooses the saved payment card from a list and then confirms the payment. A confirmation page outlines the order and expected delivery time. He then closes the browser window.

Now, if you imagine running two different personas through this scenario, each with different behaviors and motivations, you can then start to understand and pinpoint the types of activities the application will need to support. This method is also terrific at communicating design solutions to key stakeholders and business owners. Personas and scenarios used together with things like storyboards are very useful in illustrating the story of a product and empowering in justifying why designs decisions were made - which can be crucial in getting your design ideas across successfully.

Furthermore, personas and scenarios are not only useful for new applications. They can be used to benchmark the effectiveness of existing applications, pages or indeed individual sections. Any insight gained from the users of your products can only be a positive thing in providing better experiences. I thoroughly recommend their use.

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Design,

User experience

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