Using Personas During Development

A few days ago I mentioned personas and promised to go into more details on a future date. Today, I am happy to announce that we have finally reached that future date!

So what are personas exactly you ask? Well, persona's are basically fictional characters. Now before you go ahead and think I am crazy, let me explain how these fictional characters can help you with any kind of development! Developing a web site or application can be a lot of fun, but sometimes we can get carried away and lose sight of our real goals. Our ultimate goal is to satisfy the needs of our users, so its important to remember who they are while we develop.

Unfortunately, we often forget about our users while developing because we rarely get a chance to interact with them. In some cases, we develop a web site or a blog without even thinking about who will read it. We just sort of hope these users will show up once we are done! That is definitely a mistake. You need to know your audience ahead of time. Even when we do know our audience, we still often run into problems because we generalize them all into a single category. With persona's, we help ourselves remember our users by giving them more personality.

A persona is therefore a fictional character who represents a group of users who will be using the website or application you are developing. Already, rather than just having "users", we force ourselves to break these down into groups of similar users. Now, so we don't forget these groups of users, we give them names, lives, and personalities, so that we keep them in mind while developing!

If you'd like to know more about personas and are interested in using them, visit Usability.gov. This website is definitely a great resource and will get you started creating your own personas quickly. There is even and example allowing you to meet Matthew Johnson!

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