Personas – The Inmates Are running the Asylum – Alan Cooper
Develop a precise description of our user and what he wants to accomplish. 123
Hypothetical archetypes of actual users. 124
Don’t make up personas, discover them as a byproduct of the investigation proces. Do make up their names and personal details.124
Personas are defined by their goals. 124
Design for just one person. 124
Trying to please too many different points of view can kill an otherwise good product. 125
Having people love your product, even if it’s only a minority, is how you succeed. 125
The broader a target you aim for, the more certanity you have of missing the bulls-eye. 126
By narrowing your focus, you can generate fanatical customer loyalty in your target market. 126
In our design proces we newer refer to “the user.” Instead, we refer to a very specific individual: a persona. 128
The more specific we make our personas, the more effective they are as design tools. 128
We don’t just say that Emilee uses business software. We say that Emilee uses WordPerfect 5.1 to write letters to gramma. 128
If my persona is a nurse, I will use a woman rather than a man, not because there are no male nurses, but because the overwhelming majority of nurses are female…. I am shooting for believability, not diversity. 128
It’s important not to confuse a precise user taxonomy with a real person. 129
Every cast of characters has at least one primary persona. The primary persona is the individual who is the main focus of the design. To be primary, a persona is someone who must be satisffied but who cannot be satisfied with an interface for any other persona. 137
… each primary persona requires a separate and unique interface. If we identify two primary personas, we will end up designing two interfaces. 137
If we find more than three primary personas, it means that our problem set is to large and that we are trying to accomplish to much at one time. 137
We assemble all of them on a single sheet of paper containing their names, pictures, job descriptions, goals and often telltale quotes. 138
