Personas used as Means of Motivating Design Teams

Phil Barrett of Flow Interactive, the UK usability company, recently gave a presentation on personas, made fresh by his evaluation of their value as motivational. Explaining the use of personas as a top tip at the London AIGA Experience Design meeting, Barrett gave the traditional relationship that personas have with development work: 'Personas are hypothetical, archetypal user characters,' he said. They have goals: a persona's overall objectives when using a product. These become scenarios as a persona uses a product to achieve a goal.

He pointed out the benefit that 'working these out means you've set quick and dirty usability goals for your product'. And he showed how a scenario could be used to inspire design work and then to validate the outcome.

However, what made the talk inspiring was his departure from the methodology to the side-effects of using it: that personas, goals and scenarios were really 'people and stories', with all the added interest that a good soap opera has over a bunch of requirements and business goals.

'They have names and faces. The whole team can remember them,' he told the meeting. They can be designed and discussed as worst case users. They can be used to get a team thinking, or thinking in the same direction. They are 'tools to help teams think, understand each other, agree and remember'.

However, design teams sometimes find these techniques don't work, he added. Some reasons that personas can fail to unite and focus a team on an improved outcome may be that:

* Stakeholders can't see the point and just wander off, especially during the persona development stage.

* Lovely personas with a full back story are dropped in cupboard and ignored.

* Personas get applied to content (tastes), rather than interaction (ability).

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