The Persona Lifecycle —— Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design

This book is full of handy processes. I have to say, you MUST be dedicated to building personas...and so does your organization. If you're just venturing into the space, you certainly find out what's possible. If this concept is new to your organization, I would recommend finding a way to slowly introduce this process. I am certainly a believer in personas, but don't think you need the whole process to reap 80% of the benefit of personas. If your org already believes in personas and you have executive sponsorship, the content could really benefit you to launch an entire persona process.

This is a big book and it will take you along time to read it and digest it. But it is probably the essential text book for developing personas. Packed with examples, detail, case studies and guest contributors it is veritable treasure trove of wisdom on creating personas for all sorts of purposes. I bought both this and The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web The latter I found more useful and accessible, but this book is more the definitive and last resort.

The book explains things very well, and illustrates the principles it describes with a rich selection of case studies. However, this is not a book you can read through quickly because of the immense amount of detail it provides. I'd give it 5 stars as a textbook, but only four stars for general reading.

Covers both conceptual background and is full of practical hands-on advice as well. We have been using the design maps and found them very effective at speeding good design.

excellent!

If you are involved with designing and developing products and services for people, you know the importance of keeping the user (people) in mind throughout the product design. Designing for the users without involving real users is pointless. If you cannot involve the users, you can imagine them and create a personality to each and every one of them. Welcome to the next frontier for user-centered design: personas. If you want how to create and use personas to design products that people love I encourage you to read The Persona Lifecycle. The Persona Lifecycle describes the value of personas, and offers detailed techniques and tools to conceive, create, communicate, and use personas to create [great] product designs. John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin provide examples, samples, and illustrations for persona practitioners to imitate and model. It is important to emphasize that the use of personas is a method that compliments other user-centered design techniques, including user testing, scenario-based design, and cognitive walkthroughs. Personas are not always successful as a design solution, as the authors readily admit. That is why Pruitt and Adlin wrote The Persona Lifecycle: to provide solutions to some of the common problems practitioners have experienced when trying to create and use personas. The book begins with an introduction to personas (Chapter 1), followed by an overview of the persona lifecycle (Chapter 2), and five core chapters (Chapters 3 through 7) that cover the phases of the persona lifecycle. In addition, the leading usability, Human-Computer Interaction, and customer experience experts have contributed the following chapters to this book: - Larry Constantine: "Users, Roles, and Personas" introduces user roles in the context of usage-centered design and explores the relationships between user roles and personas. I found this chapter of particular interest because I am learning how to create use cases as a method of identifying system requirements. Giving the actors (users) personalities makes the use cases and tasks (roles) more meaningful. - Whitney Quesenbery: "Storytelling and Narrative" provides guidelines to create a story, the elements of a good story, and the techniques to craft a story. A well-crafted story helps the design team to establish a situation or context, illustrate a problem or a positive experience, and propose a new solution for personas. - Tamara Adlin and Holly Jamesen Carr: "Reality and Design Maps" describe how to create artifacts that help the design team to understand and communicate information about the ways that people achieve their goals and the ways they could achieve their goals with new tools. - Jonathon Grudin: "Why Personas Work: The Psychological Evidence" describes the relationship of personas to the practice of marketing. Primarily, how to get the most from personas you have created to inform product design by looking for ways they can contribute to marketing and suggestions on how to create personas for marketing purposes. - Bob Barlow-Busch: "Marketing Versus Design Personas" compares and contrasts the use of personas in marketing and design. Simply stated, a marketing persona tells the story of someone deciding to purchase a product, and a design persona tells the story of someone using it: one is a customer and the other is a user. The main purpose of a marketing persona is to understand the factors that influence people's purchase of products. Each chapter is supported by testimonials from corporate presidents, handy details (important reminders, useful definitions, and a running case study that connects all of the lifecycle phases; and concludes with a summary that revisits key topics to prepare the reader for the next phase of persona development. What I like about this book is that it is wholly dedicated to the personas. Pruitt and Adlin have been researching and using personas, leading workshops, and teaching courses at professional conferences and universities. They developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals, and became the inspiration for this book. I should mention that since the publication of this book in April 2006, Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar have published The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (VOICES). If you want to learn the techniques to inject accurate information about real users into the chaotic world of product development, you will find The Persona Lifecycle essential reading and a must have for your library.

This book is an excellent source for developing and using personas. Personas are all about understanding your users from their perspective, not from a purchasing or developer perspectives. The opportunity to create a new product that is easier to use has tremendous value to the users, the customer organization, and your own business. The authors do a great job in laying out the entire process from initial concept through the completed product development. An especially valuable part to me was the inclusion of examples of personas for products that were not the traditional web-based interaction applications. The success Pfaltzgraff has had through developing personas to create a new line of customizable dinnerware showed me the power of understanding the users for non-high tech products. As a consultant, I appreciated the "If you are a consultant" subsections. Working with a client to develop personas is a significantly different challenge than creating them as part of an internal team. There were many great suggestions on how to be successful. I also found the third party vignettes, "Stories from the Field", very helpful. The real world experiences really brought home the process steps described in the text. This book is a really valuable resource that I've been recommending to my colleagues.

この本は秀逸です。ペルソナとは何ぞや？という内容から、なぜペルソナが必要か、ペルソナからデザインへの落とし込み方や、ペルソナを使った評価方法、またアンチペルソナ派の上司の説得の仕方やら「ターゲットを一人じゃなくて全員をターゲットにしたいんです」という人への回答まで、「ペルソナ」という文字に関することなら、何でもかんでも載っています。まさにかゆいところに手が届くといいますか。ペルソナやユーザーセンタードデザインについて詳しく知りたい方は、必要な一冊だと思います。 分厚く中身も英語なので、ちょっと敬遠してしまう方も居るかもしれませんが、まずは買って一文ずつ読まなくても目を通してください。最初の方はつまらないのでどんどん飛ばして、気になるところだけ掻い摘んで読むだけでも、これまでペルソナに対して懐疑的だった箇所に当たり、気づいたら無意識のうちに読んでいることと思います。 また、それでも英語は…と思われる方は、もう少し待ってみると、日本語版が刊行されるかもしれません。

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