Whatever kind of website you have, a crucial aspect of making it usable is identifying the kinds of people you want or expect to visit your site. For example, a clothing website intended for teenagers will have different usability needs than a contact management system intended for professional salespeople. An effective technique for making sure that your website is usable by the people you want to use it is to create personas for each kind of visitor you expect or hope for.
As Wikipedia makes clear, the term ‘persona’ has a number of different meanings. In the sense of a design tool, Wikipedia for some reason puts its discussion, which is reasonably good, under Persona (marketing), although it’s not primarily about using personas for marketing purposes at all.
The concept of persona (in the design sense) has been diluted somewhat, but the core concept is that a persona is a fictional, composite character depicting one group of your actual or intended visitors. Ideally, personas are derived from actual research but, in many cases, research is impossible, and you have to use your imagination. A persona should be specific enough to allow you to ask how he or she would react to an element of your website, but not so specific that your imagination becomes limited by this fictional character’s idiosyncrasies or peculiarities. When a design team creates a persona, it often gives him or her a name, finds a (free or cheap) stock photo to use, and writes a brief sketch of the both persona’s personal and professional lives. Some design teams go so far as to get tee shirts printed, each with a different persona’s picture on it. In design meetings and walkthroughs, the person wearing the tee shirt acts as an advocate for the persona depicted. It’s not unusual to hear “Joanne wouldn’t like that.” or “Sam would find that very useful.”
In designing your website, it’s helpful to identify one persona for each type of person you want or expect to visit. For example, if you’ve got an e-commerce site that’s primarily geared to women between the ages of 18 and 30, you might want to create several different types of such women—such as a first-time visitor, a returning visitor, someone who shops on impulse, someone who usually has something very specific in mind before visiting your site, and so on. You’ll want to create your main persona to be a character you think (or know from research) is most typical of your actual or target visitors—say, a married woman, age 25, married, with two children, who enjoys shopping (and, let’s say, loves a bargain). You might also want to create personas for edge cases—the extremes of your market—say, one 18-year-old and one 30-year-old. These would be secondary personas. Another secondary persona would be a man looking for a present for his wife or girlfriend.
Another type of persona useful in website and software design is the negative persona—someone you’re specifically not designing for. For example, in designing that e-commerce website, you might want to create negative personas for people who are younger and older than your target market, people who hate computers, and so on. Negative personas are useful in keeping your design clean and uncluttered—for example, if you know you’re not designing for a persona who doesn’t use the Web very often, you don’t have to put in a lot of the hand-holding you’d design into a website for vistors who don’t understand how most websites work.
For more on personas, see Suzy Thompson’s blog posting on the subject at cooper.com.