Personas

Personas - from Wiley about face 3

To create a product that must satisfy a diverse audience of users, logic might tell you to make it as broad in its functionality as possible to accommodate the most people. This logic, however, is flawed. The best way to successfully accommodate a variety of users is to design for specific types of individuals with specific needs. When you broadly and arbitrarily extend a product’s functionality to include many constituencies, you increase the cognitive load and navigational overhead for all users. Facilities that may please some users will likely interfere with the satisfaction of others.

A simplified example of how personas are useful. If you try to design an automobile that pleases every possible driver, you end up with a car with every possible feature, but that pleases nobody. Software today is too often designed to please too many users, resulting in low user satisfaction. Figure 5-2 provides an alternative approach.