Time for Personas

I’ve been a little tough on personas. I haven’t been convinced that they are useful, and have previously thought of them more or less as a fluffy deliverable for clients with big budgets and design teams with too much time on their hands. But the more I learn about how to create personas based on research while focusing on the behaviors, motivations, and expectations of the interviewees, I am learning to see then as a valuable tool for testing viability.

As our research moves into a viability and ideation phase, I refer to a few references for persona creation pointers:

Personas by themselves are fairly useless. They become useful only when the designer sets up scenarios and uses the personas to test features for appropriateness and utility. Designers can then ask themselves: Would this persona do this task? Could this persona do this task as it is designed? - from Designing for Interaction, by Dan Saffer

Also big thanks to Cooper for the following articles on personas for a budding interaction designer:
Perfecting Your Personas
Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data

Armed with these tools, I created a chart to identify some of the more common behavior patterns of my interviewees, and developed a few personas based on the trends. Readable PDF copies of the following documents can be downloaded here: