AD-HOC Personas and Empathetic Focus 09Dec04

In this essay Donald Norman describes the purpose of Personas and a fast way of creating personas. Neither Personas have to be accurat nor is a large body of research required. Normans personas are created quickly and without much details.

Abstract:

"A Persona is an artificial person, invented for the purpose of helping a designer understand the people who will be using their product. (...) Many researchers feel that Personas should be very accurate, and although artificial, should be based on extensive research into the customer base. Moreover, these same researchers believe they should be very detailed: 'Mary is a 37 year-old single mother, working as a secretary for a law firm in the daytime and taking engineering classes at night at the local community college. She has red hair and ... .' I disagree with this philosophy. (...) The purpose of the Persona, I believe, is to add empathetic focus to the design. Empathetic focus. (...) A Persona allows designers to bring their own life-long experience to bear on the problem, and because each Persona is a realistic individual person, the designers can focus upon features, behaviors, and expectations appropriate for this individual, allowing the designer to screen off from consideration all those other wonderful ideas they may have."

Empathy is according to Norman the understanding of and identification with the user population, the better to ensure that they will be able to take advantage of the product.

related link:
Full Essay @ jnd.org

bibliography:
Pruitt, J. / Adlin, T. (2004): "The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping people in mind during product design.", San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Press