What is a persona?
Personas are fictitious users developed using information gathered through user research. They provide a practical approach to understanding the needs of key target audience and keeping user perspectives in mind throughout the web development lifecycle. Personas typically include the following items:
- Name
- Demographics
- Goals / Needs
- Abilities / Devices
Why are personas and user profiles important?
The development of personas leads to the creation of a thorough set of user profiles. User profiles are high-level user groups with shared goals and needs. Personas and user profiles support the design and development process. They help to guide decision-making by allowing preliminary testing of how decisions will affect these users. Personas require low amounts of effort, time and costs in comparison to gathering feedback from users for each decision.
Library Persona and User Profiles Working Group
Back in September the Personas and User Profiles Working Group [PDF] completed their work to create a series of personas and user profiles for representative user groups for campus, and in particular, the Library. These profiles have already been used to help support the website design and CMS implementation projects. In all, there were 5 key persons developed for the following groups:
Each of these completed user profiles included the working group’s perception (as well as incorporated the University of Waterloo's earlier surveys with stakeholders) on details for each user’s:
- Motivations for using the Library
- Frustrations
- Ideal experience, and
- A number of fast facts about each groups including:
- Adaptability
- Patience
- Likelihood to ask for help
- Technical aptitude
- Experience with using the Library
- How self-sufficient they were, and
- How curious they may be in engaging with Library services/resources
Next steps: Test and re-testing profiles
Of course, with any fictitious user profile, there will be change over time as the core demographic changes. It is always important to test and re-test with the profiles with actual representatives of each of the core groups.
