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·¢±íÆÀÂÛ£º ×îºó¸üУº ui½çÈËÎï×ÊÁÏÕûÀí Ô“ÓÃÏÂÀ­Ñ¡Ôñ¿ò»¹Êǵ¥Ñ¡¿ò£¿ ÏÖÔÚÐÒ¸£µÄN¼þÊÂÇé-2 ´òºÃÓðëÇò16·¨ [film]Ë«ÐÛ [film]ÀÏÄк¢ [music]ÔÂÁÁ´ú±íË­µÄÐÄ£¿ [film]ÁµÁµ·ç³¾ [music]·¶ÏþÝæ [music]ÀîȪ<2046> <<<COOPERÍŶӵÄÏîÄ¿¿ª·¢Á÷³Ì£¨7£© | ·µ»ØÊ×Ò³ | [film]Ö©ÖëÏÀ2>>> ½ÇÉ«£ºÉèÖþçÇéÀ´½¨ÔìÊÊÓõÄÐÅÏ¢Õ¾µã£¨1£© Ryana ·¢±íÓÚ 04-04-12 Personas: Setting the Stage for Building Usable Information Sites By Alison J. Head Not long ago, I found myself at a newspaper with a Web team who wanted my usability services for a new entertainment site they were building. Our first meeting involved a spirited discussion about the site the team had long envisioned. As the talk of this feature, which functionality, and that content flew around the room , my stomach began to churn. Despite all the creative threads being spun, pulling together this site had the potential to be as awkward as needlepointing a three-piece suit. Something needed to be done very soon. Shortly thereafter, I introduced the Web team to Greg. Greg is a local guy, 37 years old, and a busy senior loan manager for a bank in Santa Rosa, a city north of San Francisco in the heart of the wine country. He was recently divorced and has joint custody of his two young children. On weekends, Greg enjoys getting his kids out and away from the television, taking advantage of the nearby hiking trails, fishing, and canoeing available to them. When he isn't exploring the region with his kids, he enjoys taking a girlfriend to one of the fine restaurants that are as plentiful as the vineyard patches that dot the gently rolling hills behind his home. Greg has a certain penchant for collecting information about what is going on in the community. A self-described "constant-clipper," Greg rips out and cubbyholes articles, events listings, and display ads. In his most recent stash were clips about Saturday's ox roast in the Sonoma Plaza and the availability of fresh organic broccoli at the farmer's market. But Greg's stacks of clips only take him so far. The small shreds of torn paper often get lost or are soon outdated. He laments that there are so few sources for feeding his voracious appetite for information. Once the Web team got to know Greg, they quickly realized they needed to design their new site for him. And no, Greg isn't publisher's son. He isn't a newspaper subscriber, either, but someone who prefers reading the paper online during his coffee break. Actually, truth be told, Greg does not even exist. Greg is an imaginary character, better known in the high-tech field as a persona¡ª a hypothetical-user archetype, developed for interface design projects and used for guiding decisions about visual design, functionality, navigation, and content. What Are Personas? Personas are hypothetical archetypes, or "stand-ins" for actual users that drive the decision making for interface design projects. Personas are not real people, but they represent real people throughout the design process. Personas are not "made up"; they are discovered as a by-product of the investigative process. Although personas are imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and precision. Names and personal details are made up for personas to make them more realistic. Personas are defined by their goals. Interfaces are built to satisfy personas' needs and goals. Source: Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Indianapolis: Sams, 1999, pp. 123-24. (Wording condensed and modified.) PERSONA LOGIC With his best-selling book, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum , Alan Cooper has kindled a strong interest in personas among designers, programmers, and project managers alike [1] . The author's leading interaction design firm has often used personas for developing consumer hardware and software products, but personas can be applied to information-intensive Web design projects, too. The gist of Cooper's argument is fairly straightforward: There will be far greater success designing an interface that meets the goals of one specific person, instead of trying to design for the various needs of many. At first blush, though, it may seem downright counterintuitive to design for just one person, whether hypothetical or not. How can designing for a single soul possibly ensure an interface that supports the needs of many users? But as an interface becomes more layered and complex and tries to serve an ever-widening audience base, Cooper's argument holds true. As long as personas are developed with diligence, the planning and development tool has three key benefits for interface design projects of all kinds. First, personas introduce teams to hypothetical users who have names, personal traits, and habits that in a relatively short time become believable constructs for honing design specifications. Second, personas are stand-ins with archetypal characteristics that represent a much larger group of users. Third, personas give design teams a strong sense of what users' goals are and what an interface needs to fulfill them. MICROSOFT'S WOES One of the best arguments for using personas comes from some misguided design efforts at Microsoft. When the software giant geared up to redesign its well-known Microsoft Office Suite for a 1997 release, the research team soon discovered that many of the features users wanted already existed. In fact, four out of five of the features users requested for Office 97 came with Office 95. The outcome of Microsoft's design approach is just what Cooper warns against. In trying to support the diverse tasks of many conceivably different software users, Microsoft cobbled together a product that was bloated with capabilities and ended up satisfying few users. BBC'S GAINS As information-intensive Web sites become larger and more complex, defining personas at the planning stage has definite advantages. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) used a cast of personas with success late last year as part of their methodology when they tackled the redesign of their expansive site, BBCi [2] . The Web team developed a set of seven representative personas, each of whom had goals the designers planned to meet through their redesign. "Mandy Daniels" was the primary persona, or the main focus of the design. A 36-year-old harried single mother from Northampton with an America Online (AOL) account, the Web did not wow Mandy. She occasionally turned to sites in search of information about parenting, educational issues, entertainment, holiday planning, and consumer issues, when she found time apart from her hectic schedule. This, of course, was only if her boyfriend wasn't using her computer. Boiled down to a one-page narrative about Mandy's life, the thumbnail sketch was crucial in the Web team's decision-making process about the redesign. Notably, translating Mandy's qualitative life goals into design goals led to a new home page design with an intuitive grid layout. Thegrid quickly oriented Web neophytes on the run¡ªlike Mandy¡ªto the site's content. At the same time, the layout could also easily satisfy the project's secondary, less needful, and more Web-proficient personas: a retired volunteer worker; a technical services company owner; a self-employed electrician; and three students, ranging in age from elementary school to college. Drawing from all of the personas' needs and goals, the site's home page delivered "clickless access" to what users cared most about, especially children, education, recipes and food, entertainment, sports, and consumer news. With the grid, the site also became more easily updated and maintained by BBCi staff. DEVELOPING PERSONAS FOR INFORMATION SITES Through a series of ethnographic interviews with real and potential users, personas take on flesh and bones. Developing personas usually starts with collecting some demographic data, such as age, education, and job title. But the goal is to collect qualitative¡ªnot quantitative¡ªinformation. Interviewers need to gather stories, quotes, and anecdotes from interview subjects that pertain to their environment and behaviors and reveal their attitudes, Web usage habits, and goals. (See the "Essential Details for Defining Personas" sidebar) Pointers for Developing UsefulPersonas Pull together a one- to two-page precise narrative description for each persona. Identify workflow and daily behavioral patterns, using specific details, not generalities. Detail two or three technical skills to give an idea of computer competency. Include one or two fictional details about the persona's life¡ªan interest or a habit¡ªthat make each persona unique and memorable. Don't use someone you actually know as a persona; create a composite based on interviews and research data. For a new project, don't recycle a persona from a previous project; interview and create new personas for each project. Keep the number of personas created for a project relatively small¡ªusually between three and seven, depending on the interface project. Develop a believable archetype so the design team will accept the persona. Sources: Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity , Indianapolis: Sams, 1999, Chapter Nine, and Kim Goodwin, "Perfecting Your Personas," Cooper Interaction Design Newsletter , July/August 2001, http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/ 2001_07/perfecting_your_personas.htm . (Wording condensed and modified.) Despite the apparent simplicity, the persona interview needs to be rigorous. Interviewers need to ensure that useful details are collected for informing decisions about the design. To get at this data, interviewers have to listen closely to subjects and also be discriminating about the details they select to use in pulling together their final personas. Undoubtedly, more information from interviews will be collected than can be used. (See the "Pointers for Developing Useful Personas" sidebar) A good place to start an interview for an information site is with an open-ended question, such as, "Tell me about the first 2 hours of your day on an average weekday." Next, follow-up questions should be asked to gather specific details. So, for example, if a subject says she reads a newspaper, the interviewer might follow up by asking which publication, which sections of the paper, and whether the version is online or print. Likewise, if a subject says she checks her e-mail at work, the interviewer should ask how often she does this during the day, what e-mail utility is used and why, whether e-mail is checked without interruptions or with constant distractions, whether any sites are accessed during the same sessions and, if so, which ones, and so on. Mastering persona interviews requires unearthing subjects' unstated goals, not just eliciting a recitation of their daily tasks. It is crucial to identify users' narrow goals about using the Web, as well as broader ones about life, since these goals drive design decisions. Encouraging subjects to candidly and personally talk about their lives takes time. It is not unusual for some interviews, depending on what kind of interface is being designed, to last a few hours at least. A field visit, if possible, where behavior can be directly observed, can reap useful findings for developing personas, too. BREATHING LIFE INTO PERSONAS When a persona is given a name, a photo, and one or two personal details, then the hypothetical constructs easily spring to life. With Greg, the persona for the newspaper's project, we included a tidbit about Greg's interest in fresh organic broccoli and an upcoming ox roast. It was this smattering of fictional details that didn't blur Greg's narrative description but helped make him "real." In no time at all, the Web team began to refer to Greg by name, as if they actually knew him. A poster with a photo of Greg, including his brief narrative description, was soon propped up on the edge of the Web team's meeting table. During the time it took to create the site, the team checked back in with Greg, using him as a design benchmark. Would this content meet Greg's overall needs? Would Greg be able to find what he needed in the time he was willing to spend on the site? Would Greg have any interest in using a mapping feature like the one we were considering licensing? NO PRESCRIBED FORMULA Since using the persona technique for Web development projects is a relatively new investigative technique, there are few hard and fast rules. With each interview, patterns will emerge about user types. Eventually, separate user types can be grouped into one category, based on similarities between subjects' goals, needs, and behaviors. Likewise, there is no prescribed number of persona types to develop. But as a rule of thumb, the total number of personas should be kept relatively limited in number¡ªthree to seven personas¡ªso that they are distinct and can be easily remembered by project members. Despite the individuality of each project's interviewing process, there is a definite pecking order for personas. One persona needs to become the primary persona, or the primary focus of the design. The other key personas are secondary personas, archetypes who are important for the design but not as "high maintenance" as the primary persona. On some projects, there may even be a "negative persona." This anti-persona represents a group of users the site is intended to never really satisfy. Regardless of how many different secondary personas are identified for a project, it is the primary persona who dictates key design decisions. The primary persona is someone who requires a unique interface to be satisfied. In other words, the primary persona's needs cannot be met by an interface that may indeed satisfy a secondary persona. PUSHBACK AGAINST PERSONAS Project stakeholders, or "higher-ups," may initially greet the new idea of personas with some resistance. Personas frequently fall under fire because they are misconceived as being no different from traditional market segmentation tools. Although both planning tools can be effectively used together with some positive results, market segmentation and personas are quite different. Market segmentation is a quantitative forecasting tool that provides a breakdown of a consumer market and predicts someone's willingness to buy. Market segmentation derives findings from large samples with averaged data about demographics, behaviors, and attitudes. By comparison, personas are a qualitative decision-making tool. A small set of one-on-one interviews serves as descriptive fodder for determining a set of specific characters that represent the same goals of many likely users. Personas, in turn, enhance team decisions about the site's design, especially what features need to be included and how the site will be used. A MUCH-NEEDED POWER TOOL In the last few years, the return on investment of Web design dollars has fallen under close scrutiny. A recent report by an independent technology research firm, Forrester Research, is a troubling harbinger of project allocations and outcomes [3] . Forrester reports that many redesign efforts do little with investment dollars for improving sites because they do not systematically attack the problems that most need fixing. In their study of 20 site owners undergoing major redesigns, Forrester found that redesign goals were often soft and, in some cases, even unidentifiable. Most site owners described design goals vaguely by saying they were "updating their look and feel" or "making the site simpler." Additionally, there were no measurable goals for assessing the success of their sites' redesign changes (a measurable goal would be an increase of 25 percent more leads to sales teams, for instance). The Forrester report went on to make a strong case for the more diligent tracking of redesign investments and concluded that measurable user-experience goals are critical to online success. Personas are power tools that give a much-needed focus to interface design projects. Not only can personas hasten the development process by curtailing a team's "blue-skying" about a site's look and feel, personas can also help define measurable project goals in relation to users' goals, improve Web team dynamics by grounding interface design decisions, and focus a team's overall communication. When personas are used in combination with other user-centered methods, such as task analysis, card sorting, and usability testing, there is a strong likelihood that a far more usable design will be developed. Essential Details for Defining Personas A name (a real name like Greg or Madeline, etc.) Age A photo Personal information, including family and home life Work environment (the tools used and the conditions worked under, rather than a job description) Computer proficiency and comfort level with using the Web Pet peeves and technical frustrations Attitudes Motivation or "trigger" for using a high-tech product (not just tasks, but end results) Information-seeking habits and favorite resources Personal and professional goals Candid quotes Source: Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity , Indianapolis: Sams, 1999, Chapter Nine. 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