Cooper personas template

February 20th, UX Design. A brief history of user personas The user persona is one of the most significant design strategies to emerge from the user-centred design movement in computing from the mids onwards. What are user personas today? Shlomo Goltz gives his definition in a great two-part series in Smashing Magazine: A persona is a way to model, summarize and communicate research about people who have been observed or researched in some way.

Similarly, the authors of Universal Principles of Design state: Personas involve the creation of profiles for a small number of archetypal users, each profile representing a composite of a subpopulation of users. Why use them? As Goltz says: My process became more efficient and fun, while the fruits of my labor became more impactful and useful to others.

You could use headings like these to get you started: Fictional name: e. Analyse your data Depending on the product, you might not need a lot of survey or interview responses to get a good picture of who your core user groups are, and what they will need from your product. Based on the groupings and patterns you found in your data, create some draft personas.

Download our persona template for Sketch. Enjoyed this article? Try another! UX Design. Dec Aug More from the Designlab Blog. Designlab Updates. Changing Careers. The Designlab Digest—July Jul The Power of the Grid Mar Success Stories.

Improving Process and Workflow Feb Video: What the Heck is a Hackathon? Sep For example, a pre-sales manager uses my product while on move via a tablet computer whereas the sales coordinator is always in office accessing the product via desktop computer. Hi Abhay, Thanks for your feedback and suggestion.

I usually try to keep my personas free from solution-specifcs, particularly for new products and product updates aimed at new markets where the target users and their needs are often not thoroughly understood at the outset. Roman it makes sense, i can see how it could be easy to spend too much time on a persona at the beginning. Roman, although the persona is a fictional character are you putting together a persona based on actual info gathered from real people beforehand?

When determining how much time and effort should be spend upfront to create a persona, I recommend investing the bare minimum. The quickly validate the assumptions, and adapt the persona — rather than spending many weeks or months with extensive upfront research. I am hoping to write more about this topic in a separate post in the near future. When i say situation i mean with regards to a specific situation that an individual will be in for example when needing to use a web app in a particular way for something very specific, i understand that it will be different when doing this for a book or something else.

I think that sometimes when people are creating personas that they still might miss the point and are creating fluff when it might not always be a type of person using something, but a person in a type of situation.

Hi John, As a persona is meant to be a fictional character using a picture should help you to not confuse it with a real user or customer. I agree that personas should not be fluffy but specific and relevant. Does it really matter what the persona looks like? Hi John, I find that giving a persona a face makes the user believable and helps develop empathy.

Does this help? The section therefore explains who we believe is likely to use and purchase and the product and why. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Don't subscribe All Replies to my comments Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.

Personas in a Nutshell A persona is a fictional character that represents a subset of the market we want to address. A Minimalist Persona Template While personas are a powerful technique to capture knowledge about the users and customers of a product, it can be tricky to write effective personas: Some persona descriptions I have seen were too detailed and bloated; others lacked important information. An Example Here is an example of how the template can be applied.

It features one of the personas of a new book I recently started to work on: Notice that I have tried to make the persona description as relevant as possible. Visualising the Personas I prefer to capture personas on paper, so I can easily visualise them, for instance, by putting them on the Product Canvas , as the picture below illustrates.

Learn More You can learn more about this topic with the following:. Roman's Book Strategize Buy the Book. April 8, at Roman Pichler says:. Javier Nogales says:. Josef Scherer says:. December 1, at December 3, at Olga says:. June 29, at Leighton Schnell says:. December 19, at December 20, at Donato Mangialardo says:. December 28, at Ana Pereira says:. November 13, at First Name. Last Name. I agree to the privacy policy. Follow Us. About the Author. With more than 25 years' experience in Product Management, Project Management, and business development , she is comfortable helping others overcome challenges and manage cultural diversity.

Ana has worked as a business consultant as well as an instructor in various multinational companies across the globe. She is passionate about fostering an organization's Project Management culture and improving their human skills aspect. She has strong business and technical background that allows fast learning and enables immediate value generation. Connect with Ana on LinkedIn. Related Insights. Best Practices. Linkedin-in Twitter Facebook-f Instagram.

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