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Method

Personas

A method for summarizing research in a few fictional characters, with a name, goals and context, who represent groups of users.

Origin
Cooper (1999); developed at Microsoft by Pruitt and Grudin (2003)
Output
A few fictional characters, with a name, goals and context

What it’s for

Helps the team design for specific people rather than a generic user whom everyone imagines differently.

Key elements

  • Based on research

    Each character comes from what was observed, not from assumptions.

  • Few

    A handful of personas, each with different goals and context.

  • Useful for deciding

    They only include details that help make design decisions.

An example

Two ways of talking about users in a meeting.

The generic user“the users”
“Users want it to be fast.” Each person on the team imagines someone different. Anything goes.
Personas
Three characters based on interviews, each with their own goals and context. Decisions with a name.

Personas give the team a shared reference for who they are designing for.

How it’s done

  1. Research with real users.

  2. Group similar goals and behaviors.

  3. Each group becomes a character.

Applications in design

  • When to use it

    When the team has many design decisions to make and needs to keep real people in mind in each of them.

  • Avoid

    Making them up in an afternoon or filling them with stereotypes and details that don't help decide.

  • Don’t fall for it

    Remember they are a summary: they don't replace talking to real people.

Connections

Builds on

Related to

Authors and works

  1. 1999

    Alan Cooper

    Popularized personas in The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

  2. 2003

    John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin

    Showed how to use them in large teams, based on their work at Microsoft.

  3. 2006

    Christopher Chapman and Russell Milham

    Argued that two teams with the same data would not arrive at the same personas, and that there is no way to check whether they represent anyone real.

Sources

Original sources

  • Cooper, A. (1999). The inmates are running the asylum. Sams.
  • Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003). Personas: Practice and theory. In Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences (DUX). ACM. View source: Pruitt, J., & Grudin, J. (2003)

Academic reviews

  • Chapman, C. N., & Milham, R. P. (2006). The personas' new clothes: Methodological and practical arguments against a popular method. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 50(5), 634–636. View source: Chapman, C. N., & Milham, R. P. (2006)

Last reviewed: