WEM: Three Important Benefits of Personas

By Jared M. Spool Jul 27, 2010

Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They'll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map.

It doesn't matter what kind of map it is, whether it's of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They'll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster.

Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space.

While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.

Separating You from Your Work

Creating an interface for yourself is great if you're going to be the only user. When we decide how we'll arrange our kitchen cabinets—where the plates, glasses, pots, and pans will go—we want to put ourselves into the design. But, we don't expect other people to wander into our kitchen and start grabbing things without help.

When we're creating online interfaces, it's a whole different story. Here we're designing for others, not for ourselves. We may know too much about the layout and structure. We'll understand the relationships between various design elements ("That button is only used with this dropdown"). We are very familiar with the jargon and business rules.

Therefore, when a designer grounds themselves in their own design, they run the risk of designing an interface that only they can use. Any tools that help designers prevent the natural behavior of grounding helps them attack the design more objectively, with their target user in mind.

Benefit #1: Preventing Grounding with Personas

We recently had the opportunity to talk with several design teams currently using personas to help create their designs. We discovered, while studying how they integrated their personas into their design work, one major benefit was to prevent grounding.

Personas are model users that the team creates to help understand the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people who will use the interface. The persona represents behavior patterns, helping the designer understand the flow of the user's day and how the interface will fit into it.

The teams we interviewed used personas as a way to avoid the grounding problem. Instead of asking, "How would I use this system?" they asked, "How would Mary use the system?" They found their persona's (Mary) initial reference point instead of their own, making judgments about the design from the persona's point of view.

Understanding Retirement

One team in our study was working on an investment tool, primarily used by retirees. The team, who consisted of primarily 20-somethings, naturally assumed that, when they retire, they would have simple investment and financial needs. As a result, they created the initial design for simple transactions.

Their subsequent field research produced a persona named Ron, an active 76-year-old who had nine sources of income, three mortgages, and needed to write 21 checks every month from his multiple accounts. In the field, the team had seen many people similar to Ron and their transactions were anything but simple.

As soon as the team looked at their design from Ron's perspective, they realized that their simple transaction approach was going to complicate his life immensely. Putting Ron into the design, instead of themselves, made them realize that they needed to take a different approach.

It turns out that preventing grounding wasn't the only major benefit of personas we discovered during our research. Two others jumped out at us as well.

Benefit #2: The Oral Tradition Lives On

As we studied teams who made substantial use of personas, we noticed that the personas were talked about frequently, almost in mythical terms. The team members had made up lives for these people, usually based on the actual observations they made when they studied real users. They constantly used these imaginary lives to relate important stories about how these users would interact with the proposed designs.