Persona Development

Strictly speaking, a persona is a description of a person. In the usability context, a persona is a description of a person who, in turn, represents a group of your users. So, why are personas an important usability tool? Well, personas are a lot like graphs. They're a means of efficiently presenting a large volume of data—specifically, a set of user characteristics.

At Normal Modes we develop straightforward, high level personas rather than long narrative personas. This is for several reasons:

1. Narrative personas are less likely to be read in full than table-based personas.
2. Narrative personas risk alienating audiences who area "reality"-based consumers of information versus "hypothetical"-story based consumers of information (i.e., the reality based group finds it difficult to identify with something they know to be fiction). We find most developers, as well as most Normal Modes staff, are reality-based consumers of information.
3. Story-based personas quickly go amuck. Often they contain inconsequential details designed to "humanize" the fictional customer, but which at times end up diluting the major strategic value of creating them: providing information about actual users and their motivations.
4. The biggest chunk of time is spent talking with several people from each target audience and distilling those conversations into a real persona. We try not to base a persona off just one person, because we're looking to differentiate individual characteristics from the "group" characteristics (which are more global).

What are the advantages of using personas?

Simple put, personas allow everyone involved in a project (i.e., Normal Modes, you—the client, and any developers) to focus on developing the best possible product for one person, let's say, "Bob." And, because "Bob" represents an aggregation of your users' characteristics we're really developing the best possible project for them (and that's what it's all about).

How can we help you with personas?

If you want to understand who your customers are and how they think, contact us for more information about how developing personas for your target audience might help your company.