Are you using personas? (Take III)

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Krista Van Laan wonders: <<... how you determine the details about each
user. For example, if I have a product and I know that roughly 20% of the
users are women and 15% are international and 85% North American, do I
create 5 personas with one of
them Swedish and one of them female?>>

Why would you create a persona for women? You and I have different plumbing,
but when it comes to using the software, we use the same hands to control
the same keyboard and the same mouse. It's the role that's important, and
unless you want to get into a long and heated argument about gender, I
suspect you're best off not creating a "female" role in your list of
personas. Similarly, if your focus is the English interface, then you don't
need an "international" persona either. The interface is the same for
everyone.

Where things get more interesting comes when you get past that first crucial
step of identifying what everybody, irrespective of who they are, needs.
Consider the example of telephones: Everyone needs to use the same keypad
(or dial) to enter a number. But your "international" users will need to do
some things differently, such as entering a country code while your North
American users need only an area code. Again, it's not the characteristics
of the person that are important, but rather what they're trying to do and
how their context affects that; if I'm phoning home from abroad, it's more
important that I'm abroad than that I'm a North American user.

Part of the confusion I'm seeing in this discussion is that people are
equating personas with demographic information, and as the examples I've
shown suggest, the really important thing is what those people are trying to
accomplish not who they are. Once you've adequately described the task, you
can then begin worrying about how the "person" affects things. For example,
if 15% of your audience is "international", this probably means you need to
create an "international" version (in your example, Swedish). If (and I
concede this is a silly notion) Swedes don't use mouses on their computers,
you'll have to make sure the Swedish interface doesn't require the use of a
mouse. And so on.
 
<<What's the right number -- are six too many and one too few?>>

The right number, unfortunately, is as many as you need. Think of personas
in terms of the tasks that people want to accomplish, and what is required
before they can perform a task, and it'll be clearer what you need to do.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer

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