Personas? 13 Nov 2007

Here's a comment we left on 37s' site that illustrates this point:

"Here's a quick example of how we used personas on a recent project:

"One of our clients - a rail operator - wanted to allow its customers to purchase train tickets by phone / online and pick them up at the station on the day of travel. To do so, however, required customers to bring along the credit card they had used at the time of booking as proof-of-identity.

"When viewed through our own eyes (as designers / developers / people who travel quite regularly) this all seemed fine...however, upon reviewing our persona docs a problem became immediately obvious.

"The notes we'd made when constructing our 'Personal Assistant' persona revealed that PAs often booked travel on behalf of the company executives they assisted, and did so using their own credit cards. Thus, had the process described above been implemented as specified, we'd have seen lots of company execs turning up at train stations without a means of collecting their tickets (as they wouldn't have had their PA's credit card with them on the day of travel).

"Now, perhaps we should have been able to anticipate this problem without need for persona docs...but for one reason or another we didn't. Most likely because we aren't PAs ourselves and we don't employ any PAs at our company. In these circumstances, our PA persona provided a useful 'PA-by-proxy';, enabling us to validate our designs more thoroughly than we otherwise would have done - and reminding us to ensure that this users group's needs were being met as the project progressed.

"(Our 'Personal Assistant' persona wasn't made up btw - we job-shadowed ten real-life PAs in order to construct it...which is why it proved so useful later on in the project)."