Personas, goals and scenarios
To design for your target users, the first step is to define who those users are. Flow uses personas and scenarios for the job.
Personas are character profiles of your target audience, defined in some detail. They have names, faces, habits and preferences.
Personas are a great tool that allows the team to:
- Build consensus about who the target users are.
- Merge many sources of data and opinion into a format that drives successful design.
- Formulate and control feature lists and interface designs.
- Set targets for the quality of the user experience.
Personas are intended to represent your product's most challenging users. Then, if your personas can use your product, you can be confident that all your users can. For example, they may have disabilities, be at the very edge or your target age range or need to use your product in challenging contexts - maybe on the move, or in a busy office.
How it works
We create personas and scenarios in team workshops. The personas workshop can be the first step of a larger concept design workshop. Attendees should include business owners, marketers, editors, designers and developers.
To create the personas, we make use of all the research material you have about your product's user base. This can include information gathered from ethnographic studies, usability tests, online user research, focus groups, surveys, search logs and customer support logs.
In the workshop we review available research, identify the dimensions of user behaviour, rapidly create a number of personas and then narrow down the list. The most relevant and challenging personas are worked up in detail.
From there, the group identifies the goals that each persona wants to achieve by using the product. They can then create key scenarios: stories or cartoons that describe the steps users will go through to get to their final goals.
The team can also use personas to rationalise an existing list of feature ideas, by testing each feature to see how much the personas would really want it.
Results
Personas let you boil down your knowledge and your design goals into the smallest, simplest form you can. A typical interactive product might have 1 to 3 personas.
After the workshop, Flow documents the personas and scenarios in a format that's simple and engaging. Personas are usually delivered as posters. Scenarios can be written up as stories or cartoon strips.
The whole persona and scenario process typically takes 3 to 5 days.
