Personas: Practice and Theory
This idea of “personas” is completely new to me. I really had no idea that such an extensive and detailed extension of audience research existed. The article covered every aspect of how the personas are chosen, created, used, and even marketed and followed the creation of personas for Windows and MSN Explorer. It turns out that a persona is basically a made up character that represents and actual person or customer that would most likely use or benefit from a particular product or service. A company generally creates a set of personas, covering a variety of types of potential customers. The team building the Windows personas focused on six different ones. Because it’s so important to really narrow down the type of character that would use a product, usually there is a department or team of people dedicated solely to developing the personas.
Why spend so much time and energy developing these fictional characters to represent a typical customer or target audience? It’s all about covering the needs off all your customers, no matter how diverse they may be. Having a persona allows for accurate product development and trouble shooting. When a designer has a specific customer to develop for, and a diverse set of them at that, they can design with a variety of scenarios and needs in mind. These “Personas” seem to be a pretty good tool and all the time and energy that goes into developing them can really pay off.
