14 October 2009
How to Understand Your Users with Personas
Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites.
Come hear Dan Cederholm, Jason Santa Maria, Joshua Davis, Bill Buxton, Daniel Burka, Elliot Jay Stocks and more speak at The Future of Web Design NYC on Nov 16 – 17th.
More about Personas
Putting Personas Under the Microscope
cooper.com/journal/personas
The Origin of Personas
cooper.com/journal/2003/08/the_origin_of_personas.html
Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data
cooper.com/journal/2002/11/getting_from_research_to_perso.html
Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
uie.com/articles/goodwin_interview
What’s your customer’s persona?
usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/columnist/abrams/2005-02-18-persona_x.htm
More from Indi Young:
Book: Mental Models
rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models
Look at it Another Way
alistapart.com/articles/lookatitanotherway
More comics from Brad Colbow:
Misunderstanding Markup
smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/29/misunderstanding-markup-xhtml-2-comic-strip
Alignment in design:
sixrevisions.com/web_design/the-brads-alignment-in-design
The Brads, a weekly web comic
bradcolbow.com
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Kyle Steed
# October 14, 2009 - 4:07 pm
Brad, you’ve done it again. You whimsical style can bring even the dullest (yet important) topics to life. I am really enjoying this new venture you’re taking. And it’s so awesome you are able to be featured on the Carsonified blog. A big #WOOT is in order here.
Nate Klaiber
# October 14, 2009 - 5:44 pm
Awesome job relaying this through a fun comic, Brad. Love it.
Julie Booth
# October 14, 2009 - 6:10 pm
Great article! Very fun. I am going to use this :)
chad engle
# October 14, 2009 - 7:05 pm
Brad,
You seriously rock man. I really liked that. It was amazing. Keep up the awesome work!
Chris Cavallucci
# October 14, 2009 - 7:14 pm
Brad,
Great job. I really liked subtle elements.
Has Indi seen it?
Cheers.
Dave Vogler
# October 14, 2009 - 8:04 pm
Awesome! You could make some seriously effective training cartoons. Technical topics are more easily understood when presented this way. (at least for me)
Keep up the great work!
Justin Cline
# October 14, 2009 - 10:23 pm
Well played, love the Ackbar reference too.
James Tryon
# October 14, 2009 - 11:18 pm
Its nice to see information like this sometimes. Good Job!
Indi Young
# October 15, 2009 - 12:37 am
I love the cauldron full of magic potion–I think that explains how most processes work are large organizations, right? Brad did a great job with the subtle hinting …
John Faulds
# October 15, 2009 - 4:32 am
What the others said: awesome work! :)
Neen
# October 15, 2009 - 6:01 am
just stumbled upon this content and agree with the folks above – love the easy to digest but full of goodness article. The cartoon really held my interest my better than conventional text. Look forward to reading more in future.
Georg Portenkirchner
# October 15, 2009 - 6:29 am
Very funny! I really liked it.
Janko
# October 15, 2009 - 7:45 am
Awesome cartoon and great idea to present this topic!
Iain Broome
# October 15, 2009 - 12:19 pm
Great stuff. I’ve used personas plenty of times, both for marketing campaigns and for planning content for websites with multiple audiences. They can be really useful, but also flexible in the sense that there’s no one approach. Plus, a decent set of personas make explaining your ideas to clients much easier.
Rudi
# October 15, 2009 - 1:46 pm
Great post! Spot on!
Jeff Parks
# October 15, 2009 - 3:10 pm
Great work Brad – love the use of comics to illustrate the value of such work. Nicely done! :)
Jodi Bollaert
# October 15, 2009 - 5:52 pm
Brad, you have a new follower in me. This is great stuff.
John Haydon
# October 15, 2009 - 6:43 pm
Brad – This is one of the freshest ways to look to the human element of web design that I’ve seen. It turns theory and research into an approach that’s accessable and fun! Thanks!
Ryan Glover
# October 15, 2009 - 7:29 pm
Quite entertaining. Glad to see some resources are attached to it as well. I’ll make note to thumb through them later. Thanks!
Zac
# October 16, 2009 - 4:31 am
This is so awesome. Thank you!
Holger
# October 16, 2009 - 6:53 am
I’m at a loss for words. GREAT GREAT GREAT – thx a lot –
PLEASE! … Keep up this awesome work.
Mònica
# October 16, 2009 - 10:37 am
Great! Now I’ve an incredible tool to present this method to the clients. Thanks Brad!
Eugenio Grigolon
# October 16, 2009 - 6:25 pm
Amazing job with the illustration. Very cool and relaxing. Congrats!
Carl - Web Courses Bangkok
# October 17, 2009 - 8:28 am
HAHA loved it, specially how random people end up steering a project.
Ara
# October 18, 2009 - 10:31 pm
Speechless…. Keep up this awesome work!
Harmony
# October 19, 2009 - 1:55 am
Clear, concise and funny, not to mention useful, thanks guys :)
pixtur
# October 19, 2009 - 7:35 am
Ah, who cares about personas. We want PONIES! :-)
deltacubed web design
# October 20, 2009 - 8:08 am
Really enjoyed this – thank you! As others have said, the comic style brings what is essentially a *slightly* dry subject to life. Top work.
Annika Y
# October 21, 2009 - 9:45 am
This is GREAT~ I enjoyed it a lot! Thank you:)
demiroush1835
# October 22, 2009 - 6:56 am
I really enjoy it. Thank for the post.
That’s great. Nice
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Vege
# October 22, 2009 - 8:01 am
Very well said. I like the way you’ve explained it with the use of comic graphics. Awesome work. Thanks!
admanzion
# October 23, 2009 - 7:57 am
nice article,really awesome
Mauricio Hernandez
# October 23, 2009 - 3:49 pm
Nice cartoons, very nice to understan a complex idea like that, does the personas work well when testing an interface? or just for design process?
Derek Pennycuff
# November 23, 2009 - 9:05 pm
Personas for “role playing” during usability testing is my graduate thesis topic in a nutshell. So far I’ve been able to turn up very little info on the idea. Nielsen seems to think it’s a terrible idea due to the loss of authentic user experience.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050214.html
While I respect Nielsen, his opinion isn’t the same as data.
There’s a paper that looks at data from one of the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies (#4 I think) and they found that one team out performs expectations based on variables such as recruiting methodology, number of participants, and task coverage.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240839
There were 2 big differences in how this team operated. 1. They took a laptop out and about in a bit of a guerrilla style rather than in a lab. 2. Participants were given a persona and a scenario to play out during their test.
So maybe one of those elements is responsible for the increased performance. Or maybe the combination of the 2. Or maybe it’s a fluke. But it seemed like an easy enough thesis to test so I took it as my research topic. :)
If anyone has further data on the topic, add my interest to Mauricio’s and share it here please.
B MB M
# October 28, 2009 - 10:38 am
mjb
B MB M
# October 28, 2009 - 10:39 am
bn
Amanda McNeill
# October 30, 2009 - 6:38 pm
Very fun! Here is an article from Website Magazine you may find interesting it reviews usability tools http://bit.ly/32mqlQ
I am affiliated with usertesting.com but the article covers several tools.
Amanda
Shawn
# November 2, 2009 - 6:42 pm
Wondering if anyone on this thread has experience proving the ROI on persona development? How do you typically go about communicating ROI benefits within a persona pitch and then measure once the personas have been developed?
Abhijit Shirsath
# November 11, 2009 - 5:01 pm
Awesome article!
Neil Dennis
# November 17, 2009 - 3:40 pm
Well done Brad – a thoroughly entertaining and useful article.. illustration helps to make personas easier to understand.
Isaac Lewis
# November 17, 2009 - 9:20 pm
As the above commenters said, I really like this as a teaching method. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes – did anyone see _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby? Similar concepts (used comics to teach the Ruby programming language) but not quite as succesful IMO – the comics didn’t really tie in to the material.
This is good though. Brad, I’ve just posted your website to http://unistartups.slinkset.com/ , hopefully it’ll give you a traffic boost ;)
Derek Pennycuff
# November 23, 2009 - 8:43 pm
I wanted to buy Mental Models last week, but Amazon said it was out of print. Now I’ve had an excuse to dig into it further and I see how Rosenfeld’s business model is essentially print on demand (correct me if I’m wrong) and this confuses Amazon when it comes to ideas such as “out of print”. Glad to be able to put this back on my wish list.
The comic is awesome too, btw. :)
Lou Rosenfeld
# March 16, 2010 - 3:52 am
Hi Derek, Amazon is absolutely broken, but being (essentially) a monopoly means never having to say you’re sorry.
The book is most definitely in print, not POD (but a “real” book, with sewn bindings, four color interiors, and other great features), and can be purchased along with a digital copy here: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/
Or, if you must, from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, though you’d make my day if you bought it directly from us.
Thanks!
WIll
# November 25, 2009 - 8:00 am
This is a very informative post and a very entertaining comic too, PONIES! )
Jody
# November 26, 2009 - 2:10 pm
I want a ponie too! :)
Rick
# December 14, 2009 - 5:58 pm
Pretty fantastic, Brad. :) Our little studio just went through the rigors of coming up with and developing backgrounds on several personas for a major northwest client. (We posted about our experience here http://blog.bullseyecreative.net/customer-persona-development/)
To be honest, it was a lot of fun and something I think the whole team looks forward to doing again. It was interesting that, based on a series of data results, patterns emerged that we were able to build into people that seemed wholly authentic. Looking back on it now, it’s still hard to believe that these people we made don’t actually exist. I think this is the reason persona use is increasing. They’re easy customers to target.
But seriously, we need more ponies on this site. Thanks.