- One of the most challenging tasks we're faced with
in design is to understand our audience.
Researchers and designers spend a lot of time and effort
trying to create a clear picture of who an audience is.
Understanding the audience helps us to make
educated predictions about how people will use,
behave with, and adopt our solutions.
Will our audience like this message,
be attracted to this ad, relate to this brand,
be attracted to this package, eat at this restaurant?
Understanding our audience also helps us to
predict change and preference.
Will they like this color pink instead of the old red?
This pattern? This typeface?
This color pallette?
This wording or phrase?
This photograph?
To help us comprehend how our audience will engage
and interact with our work,
we can create personas.
Personas are fictitious summaries that represent
the people who define an audience.
They're created by research data
that demonstrates how real users
think and react within a context.
For instance, let's say that a team of researchers
observed a group of young boys skateboarding in the park.
Through their observations they realized
that there are two types of skateboarders,
the aggressive boys who can perform tricks,
and the passive boys who are still watching and learning.
Using these observations the researchers developed
a persona for each respective group.
The Aggressive Boy is Derek
and the Passive Boy is Mark.
Creating an accurate persona can be a difficult task
that require a variety of research sources,
including ethnography, focus groups,
and demographics and psychographics.
By analyzing multiple points of research,
common thoughts, behaviors, and personalities
can then be identified and used to create a persona.
A well-crafted persona should have a short description
of the person that includes their attitudes,
behaviors, goals, personal details, and more
as it relates to the scenario being studied.
Let's take another look at one of our skateboard personas.
Derek is a 17-year old boy who has been
skateboarding since he was 12.
He wears baggy shorts and a t-shirt of the band Sex Pistols.
He likes to listen to punk rock music while he skates,
and he has a group of 4 or 5 friends
that behave just like him.
He knows how to ride on multiple ramps,
and he does numerous different tricks.
If he messes or falls, he laughs
and gets back up quickly.
He loves watching the xtreme games on tv
and he aspires to be the next Tony Hawk.
Okay, so you should have a pretty clear
picture of Derek, right?
So now that we have a persona,
what can we do with it?
We can use Derek and Mark to help frame a problem,
share research findings,
and explore how effective
possible design solutions might be.
You might be thinking why spend time
creating fictitious people when we could
just go out and talk to the real users?
Alan Cooper provides a reply to this question
in his book, "The Inmates Are Running The Asylum."
He says, "The most obvious approach - to find the actual
"user and ask him - doesn't work for a number of reasons,
"but the main one is that merely being the victim
"of a particular problem doesn't automatically
"bestow on one the power to see its solution."
So although personas are fictitious,
you can analyze their behaviors closely
and use this information to gauge how and why
they respond to a situation.
Like most of what we've talked about,
personas should be used as one component
of a larger synthesis process.
Just like many of the tools we discussed,
personas do have certain limitations
and include a bias.
Using personas alongside market research and ethnography
helps to validate the findings
and provide the most valuable information.
They are a particularly helpful tool to use
as you shift from research to design.
This is because they help focus the design team
directly on the user's needs.
How will Derek respond to a skateboarder
with a cartoon character on it?
Will he wear this new helmet
if he sees a famous skater with it on?
What does Derek want from the new
skate park we're designing?
In the next movie, we'll take a closer look
at how to use personas effectively to frame a problem,
to share our research,
and test possible solutions.