Personas in Agile
Personas, first introduced by Alan Cooper, define the archetypal user of a system, a representation of the person who will interact with it. The idea is that if you want to develop software, it should be designed for a specific individual. In other words, personas are fictional characters based on your knowledge of real users.
You are probably familiar with actors. Unlike actors, personas are not roles played by people. For example, in a banking application, we might have personas like “Client” and “Credit Card Processor.” Personas are often documented in one or two sentences describing their role. For instance, the description of “Client” might look like this: “An individual or organization conducting business with the bank.”
Personas should be described as if they were real people. They can have names, personality traits, families, jobs, skill levels, preferences, behavior models, and personal relationships. It’s also good practice to write a short “day in the life” story and add images to help the team visualize users.
Quite often, one or two pages of documentation are written for each persona. The goal is to bring your users to life, developing personas with real names, personalities, motives, and often even photos. In essence, a good persona is highly personalized.
You’ll need to develop several personas, perhaps seven or eight for a banking system, to ensure you understand all the needs of your customer base. To write effective personas, you’ll need to conduct some user group research to make sure you genuinely understand your users. You might want to conduct a focus group with potential users, talk to your support staff (support staff often have a good understanding of end-user needs), or talk to product managers whose job is to understand your users.
Personas are incredibly useful when you don’t have easy access to real users because they act as “stand-ins for users,” helping guide your decisions regarding functionality and design. Answers to questions like “How will Max use this feature?” or “Will Nick be interested in this?” can help initiate discussions within your team, prompting you to think the way your users really think. Personas are often used in the creation of web software, such as Amazon or eBay systems. Personas and usage scenarios are highly popular at Microsoft and are one of the artifacts described in their Agile process, Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF).
In the book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum,” Alan Cooper suggests the following methods for writing effective personas:
- You don’t “create” personas; you discover them as a byproduct of the requirements discovery process.
- Describe specific personas: by designing for one person, you will do the job much more successfully.
- To understand what your system should and shouldn’t do, you need to understand the goals of the personas.
- If you’ve identified more than three primary personas, your scope is probably too large.
- You need a limited number of personas; your goal is to narrow down the circle of people for whom you are developing the system.
Tag:Agile, Business, Terminology