Personas that change the way you think

Gundega Lazdāne CBAP, Business analysis team lead at FMS, LatviaArmands Ķirītis, Msc. Comp, Product owner at FMS, Latvia

Agenda

• Who are persons• Who are Personas• How to create Personas• How to use Personas• A practical example by Armands Ķirītis

Gundega Lazdāne, CBAP

• Ing. Sc. Masters degree• 15 years in Business Analysis• BA team lead at FMS • President of Latvia IIBA® chapter

Armands Ķirītis

• Masters degree in ComputerScience – Information Systems

• 6+ years experience as aBusiness Analyst

• Product owner at FMS

• One of the largest software companies in Latvia complying ISO 9001:2009

• ERP system Horizon, System integration, BI• R&D laboratory

Who are persons?

• Linda Miller• 29 years old• Married, has no children• Loves to travel• Works as accountant

• Bill Johnson• 58 years old• Married, has 2 children

and 6 grandchildren• Loves to play poker• Works as accountant

Who are persons?

• Actor • Accountant

Who are we developing to?

• Some groups of people who have similar set of tasks

Who do we understand better?

Accountants in general

Real people who have a job as

accountant

Who do we understand better?

Accountants in general

Real people who have a job as an

accountant

Why then do we make productsfor abstract user groups?

Let’s make products forreal persons

Challenge: • All people aren’t similar – if we create a

product based on requirements of a few users, others won’t like it

Solution:• Personas – real people alike archetypes that

are based on real-world data about user groups

About Personas

“The inmates are running the asylum”, 1998

Alan Cooper

Who are Personas?

• Personas look like real persons• Personas are not real persons• Personas are created based on motivation

and behavior of real people• Personas are created using data collected

from real people by observing and exploring

Personas as well as persons have

• Photo• Biography• Social situation• Dreams and personal aims

… this creates empathy.

Name

Demographic information

Motivation

Aims

Behavior

Personas as well as persons have

• Photo• Biography• Social situation• Dreams and personal aims

… this creates empathy.

Name

Demographic information

Motivation

Aims

Behavior

Empathy is the ability to understand and share

another person’s feelings

4 steps creating Persona1. Identify and fill atributes2. Focus on goals not activities3. Identify behavior patterns4. Expand description

Step 1: Identify and fill attributes

Activities Attitude Aptitude

Motivation Skills

Step 2: Focus on goals not features

Step 3: Identify behavior patterns

Step 4: Expand description

How to use Personas

• To communicate requirements in a team• To specify product behavior• To evaluate interfaces• For marketing purposes

The Horizon WEB 2.0

Persona based improvement

• The most popular ERP system in Latvia– About 30% of the market, – About 80% of the public sector

• Desktop application• 1500 clients (public and private sector)• More than 20 years of development

Horizon WEB

• WEB counterpart of the Horizon system• Self-service for employees • Some specific usages for operators covered

History of Horizon WEB

• Was developed to make some functions more accessible via WEB interface

• The functionality is expanded over time

The problem

• 20+ years of experience with ERP that is meant for advanced users

• Implementing the WEB product in similar style and interface as desktop Horizon

• Users aren’t always happy with the UI/UX of the system as it is more document oriented than user oriented

The job to do

• Find a method that allows us to transform the system from document-focused to user-focused

• Utilize that method• Improve the UX by remaking the product

The preparation

• Goals• Planning• Generating ideas• Kick-off• Tasks• Methods

The Personas – why?

• Several authors recommend this method as very user-centric, for example, Scott Klemmer, Marty Cagan

• Good feedback from practitioners

Our approach

• We have a lot of information about our users:– Regular seminars and meetings– Client requests online– Other ways to get feedback

• This information: the basis for creating Personas

• Additional interviews for extra info and observation

Creating a list of behavioral variables

Activities• Office based or mobile• Percentage of activities in product domain• Few or many parallel tasks

Attitudes• Attitude towards information systems• Attitude towards electronic devices

Aptitudes• Education level• Additional courses taken

Motivations• Salary level• Enthusiastic about work• Workload

Skills• Computer user skills• Communication skills

The job roles

• Choosing the relevant job roles that we build Horizon WEB for (and the ones we don’t build for)

CEO Nurse HR manager Clerk

Continuing the work

• Process information about the subjects – chosen from various job roles

• Investigating the variable values for those roles

• Creating behavioral patterns for the roles

Synthesizing characteristics and goals

• Creating a table containing our behavioral patterns and bullet points of the characteristics and goals

Checking for redundancy and completeness• As the roles were planned in order to be

distinct, we didn’t find any redundancy• By additional interviews found some roles

missing• Added the information about the missing

roles and their behavioral patterns

Expanding description of attributes

• Adding a description about the person, a narrative

• Still containing the bullet points for completeness – a combination of both narration and structure

• A photo found in the Internet that describes the person

Assigning the persona types

• Positive personas: primary, secondary, supplemental

• Negative personas

The problem of scope• We determined 2 primary personas• Split the scope in two separate functional

areas

Horizon WEB

Self service system

Operator’s station

Reassigning the persona types

• Splitting the persona types to both self-service and operator’s station

• Several personas are excluded from the scope of operator’s stations as they do not use this functionality

• Some personas are added as negative persons for the self-service area as they do not fit the user we’re building the self-service system for

Expanded: John the seller

• One of the described Personas: John the seller

The requirements

• Writing context scenarios for the primary and some of the secondary personas

• Their typical workday involving the usage of Horizon WEB

• Defining the requirements for improvements

The implementation

• The Horizon WEB 2.0– New focus – the user– New technology (WEB forms --> MVC)

• The system is modular: implementing the changes in one module at a time

The benefits

• We had a set of characteristics for the people we build the product for

• Terminology change: we develop for the personas who have names (empathy)

• The priorities of requirements are defined by the persona they’re derived from

The benefits

• User testing: we can do user testing from the viewpoint of a persona without involving real users at first

• Personas can also be used for creating marketing material

Our results

• The first round changes in first specific module: Document Circulation are already implemented and delivered to our clients

• We did:– User testing– Surveys– Analysis of usage logs

Before… Circulation of a vacation request

After the remake

Further perspective

• Remaking other modules in the same way• The personas are reusable for future

projects thus making them a good tool for long term product development

Pros and challenges

• Better understanding of end users• The personas can be used as a

communication tool in the team• The method brings results

• More analysis has to be done at first• The thinking and development principles

have to be changed

Reading & learning suggestions• Alan Cooper: About Face 3,

http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111

• Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt: The Essential Persona Lifecyclehttp://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Persona-Lifecycle-Building/dp/0123814189

• Chris Nodder, Lynda.com course “UX Design Techniques: Creating Personas”http://www.lynda.com/Web-User-Experience-tutorials/UX-Design-Techniques-Creating-Personas/144082-2.html

• Scott Klemmer: Human-Computer Interaction, course in Coursera, started on 30.06.2014., https://www.coursera.org/course/hciucsd

Thank you for your attention