Table Of ContentThe Essential Persona Lifecycle
The Essential
Persona Lifecycle
Your Guide to Building and
Using Personas
Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt
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This book is dedicated to the hundreds of brave souls who have participated in our
workshops and worked with us as clients or colleagues over the past 10 years. Your creativity
and experiences helped us build this process, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Oh, and we both adore our families and friends. Your support
(and patience) mean the world to us.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Tamara Adlin is the president of adlin, inc., a user experience strategy company in Seattle,
Washington. Tamara’s focus is on…focus! She’s an expert at wrangling executive teams until
they agree on a shared, crystal-clear, and prioritized set of key users and their goals; she
believes that teams who can develop and stick with a solid focus on their users are in the
best position to create really great products. She has tons of fun running workshops with
executives, and then diving in to help teams who are working ‘in the trenches’ to design and
develop great products. Tamara co-authored The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind
Throughout Product Design with John Pruitt, has been featured in several other books, and has
been invited to speak on user experience strategy all over the world. In her recent work life,
Tamara co-founded Fell Swoop, a user experience design company, and she ran a customer
experience and usability team at Amazon.com. She cut her professional teeth at a series of
Seattle tech startups after getting her Master’s Degree in Technical Communication from
the University of Washington. Today, she’s happily focusing on practical methods that help
business people increase their bottom lines by focusing on their customers, and she’s got her
work cut out for her.
John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version
of SharePoint as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of products. Since joining Microsoft
in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows
(including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated
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Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the
Tablet PC and the super small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he
was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced
Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian
scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of
journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-
making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using
personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring
numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John co-authored the
book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, with Tamara
Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry
events.
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CHAPTER
What are personas?
CHAPTER ouTlInE
Introduction 1 What Additional Materials Will I
Why a Persona lifecycle? 1 find in the original Persona
The Five Phases of the Persona Lifecycle 2 lifecycle Book? 4
Why Another Persona lifecycle Book? 4
InTRoduCTIon
1
Personas are fictitious, specific, concrete representations of target users. The notion of
personas was created by Alan Cooper and popularized in his book The Inmates Are Running
the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams
Publishing, 1999). Personas put a face on the user—a memorable, engaging, and actionable
image that serves as a design target. They convey information about users to your product
team in ways that other artifacts cannot.
Personas have many benefits:
l Personas make assumptions and knowledge about users explicit, creating a common
language with which to talk about users meaningfully.
l Personas allow you to focus on and design for a small set of specific users (who are not
necessarily like you), helping you make better decisions.
l Personas engender interest and empathy toward users, engaging your team in a way that
other representations of user data cannot.
In other words, personas will help you, your team, and your organization become more user
focused.
WHy A PERsonA lIfECyClE?
We originally wrote The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
because lots of people were excited about personas, but:
l No one had described, in practical terms, how to create personas.
l No one had described specific tools for using personas during a product development
process.
l Practitioners who had tried personas had failed in their efforts more often than they had
succeeded.
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
We looked into why so many persona efforts were failing, and we found four common
reasons:
1. The effort was not accepted or supported by the leadership team.
2. The personas were not credible and not associated with methodological rigor and data.
3. The personas were poorly communicated.
4. The product design and development team employing personas did not understand how
to use them.
The Persona Lifecycle was a solution: an end-to-end set of methods and tools designed to
support persona practitioners from the moment they decided to try personas until well after
the completion of a project. The persona lifecycle is built on several core assertions, all of
which arose from our research and experience:
l Building personas from assumptions is good; building personas from data is much, much
better.
l Personas are not documents. They are shared ideas around who your users are that must
come to life in the minds of the people in your organization.
l Personas are a highly memorable, inherently usable communication tool if they are
communicated well.
l Personas can be initiated by executives or first used as part of a bottom-up grass-roots
experiment, but eventually they require support at all levels of an organization.
l As long as personas are well built, data driven (or otherwise validated and agreed upon),
and thoughtfully communicated, the product team can use the personas that come to
exist to generate new insights and seek out the right details when they need them.
l Personas are not a stand-alone, user-centered design (UCD) process but should be
integrated into existing processes and used to augment existing tools.
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l Effective persona efforts require organizational introspection and strategic thinking.
l Personas can be created and show their value quickly, but if you want to obtain the full
value from personas you will have to commit to a significant investment of time and
resources.
We understand that the devil is in the details when it comes to launching a persona effort
within an organization, and we are excited to share specific techniques that will help you
succeed in your own persona efforts and in turn help your organization realize the benefits
of truly UCD.
The five phases of the persona lifecycle
The persona lifecycle is a metaphoric framework that breaks the persona process into phases
similar to those of human procreation and development. As shown in Figure 1.1, the five
phases in this framework bring structure to the potentially complicated process of persona
creation and highlight critical (yet often overlooked or ignored) aspects of persona use:
l Family planning—Before you begin any persona effort, you should figure out what
problems you’re trying to solve and what materials (specifically, data sources) are already
available for you to use.
l Conception and gestation—Organize assumptions; turn data into information and
information into personas.
l Birth and maturation—Create a persona campaign and introduce the personas to your
organization.
l Adulthood—Use the personas in specific ways to help during the design, development,
evaluation, and release of your product.
l Lifetime achievement and retirement—Measure the success of the persona effort and create a
plan to reuse or retire the personas.
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
Lifetime Family Planning
Achievment
& Retirement
Conception & Gestation
Adulthood
Birth & Maturation
fIguRE 1.1
The five phases of the persona lifecycle. This diagram is designed to show both the order of the phases (from
family planning through conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and finally lifetime achievement
3
and retirement) and the relative amount of effort and importance related to each phase. Each lifecycle phase is
covered in detail in subsequent chapters of this book.
As the name indicates, the persona lifecycle is a cyclical, largely serial, process model. As
Figure 1.1 shows, each stage builds on the next, culminating but not ending at the adulthood
phase. Note also that the final stage, lifetime achievement and retirement, is not immediately
followed by a cyclical return to the first stage. This is because different persona efforts
culminate and restart in different ways. Personas can be reused, reincarnated, or retired
depending on the project.
More importantly, although each phase does build on the previous, some are more
important than others, and some you can complete in just an hour or two if need be.
Conception and gestation and adulthood are the vital steps. As you read this book, remember
that you can (and should) customize your own persona process in accordance with the
amount of time, resources, and data you have.
The persona lifecycle doesn’t have to take a long time. You can, and should, be selective in
the techniques you choose to integrate into your persona effort. Although we do not think
it is a good idea to skip any of the lifecycle phases completely, we do believe it is completely
acceptable to take some shortcuts within any of the phases. Giving some attention to every
phase will increase the odds that your persona effort will ultimately be successful. Your
overall goal should be to create helpful and well-used personas, not to follow the process
described in this book to the letter. Throughout the book, we suggest both complete end-to-
end processes and helpful shortcuts. We point out the processes we believe to be the most
important and effective, and you can treat each chapter as a menu of techniques and tools
that can be used together or independently.
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
WHy AnoTHER PERsonA lIfECyClE Book?
The original version of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
is rich in details, examples, philosophy, and stories from the field. It was written to give
you the full context around every aspect of persona creation, communication, and use, in
addition to as many tools and tricks as we could find. The original is a reference tome that
will help practitioners navigate the specific needs of their own organizations … and get past
the inevitable hurdles everyone faces during a persona effort.
This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is
completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the
particular tool or method is the right one. For that reason, we have significantly shortened
the entire book, and we have further abridged the chapters that did not include critical steps
in the persona creation and use process.
We have focused the content as follows:
l Family planning—Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you get organized
l Conception and gestation—Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to
completed personas
l Birth and maturation—Strategic techniques to get the right information about your
personas out to your teammates at the right time
l Adulthood—Specific tools that will ensure your personas are used by the right people at
the right times (and in the right ways!) during the product development cycle
l Lifetime achievement and retirement—Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you
measure the success of your persona effort … and prepare for the next one
Again, we don’t recommend that you skip any step in the persona lifecycle (even those that
4 we cover very briefly here). In this book, we include some guidelines that will help you with
every phase, no matter how much time you have. Our goal is to help you give some thought
to important issues and jot down some basic information. A little upfront work will be
incredibly helpful when you need to justify your project, capture lessons learned, and plan
for your next persona effort.
WHAT AddITIonAl MATERIAls WIll I fInd In THE
oRIgInAl PERsonA lIfECyClE Book?
Our original book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, is a
lot longer than this edition, which provides a very practical—in some cases, a step-by-step—
description of the basics of the persona lifecycle; the original includes much more in-depth
content. Several chapters in this edition, including those on family planning and retirement
and lifetime achievement, have been radically shortened; they tell you what you need to
do but do not include details on how to do some of these steps. The chapter on birth and
maturation is shortened, but not as drastically; it still contains some specific how-to methods
and suggestions. The chapters on conception and gestation and adulthood are also still quite
detailed, and they include a few important updates based on lessons we’ve learned since our
original book was published.
Having said that, one of our most important insights into persona projects is that the
devil is always in the details. If you find yourself stuck during the process, don’t despair.
Instead, consult the original persona lifecycle book for many more details and suggestions,
including:
l A complete history of the origin of personas
l Detailed analysis of why personas work and what causes them to fail
l Many “bright ideas” to help streamline your persona efforts
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
l Dozens of stories from the field written by other persona practitioners that will give you
first hand insights based on their experiences and ideas for new methods and tools that
have worked for them
l An extensive case study based on our fictitious company, G4K, which provides examples
of all the materials related to a successful persona effort
In addition, the original book includes five invited chapters written by persona experts:
l “Users, Roles, and Personas,” by Larry Constantine
l “Storytelling and Narrative,” by Whitney Quesenberry
l “Reality and Design Maps,” by Tamara Adlin and Holly Jamesen
l “Marketing Versus Design Personas,” by Bob Barlow-Busch
l “Why Personas Work: The Psychological Evidence,” by Jonathan Grudin
But don’t worry: we’ve made sure to provide you with all the basics you’ll need as you
embark on your persona effort right here in this book.
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