Personas that change the way you think

Gundega Lazdāne CBAP, Business analysis team lead at FMS, Latvia

Armands Ķirītis, Msc. Comp, Product owner at FMS, Latvia

Agenda

• Who are persons

• Who are Personas

• How to create Personas

• How to use Personas

• A practical example by Armands Ķirītis

Gundega Lazdāne, CBAP

• Ing. Sc. Masters degree

• 15 years in Business Analysis

• BA team lead at FMS

• President of Latvia IIBA® chapter

Armands Ķirītis

• Masters degree in Computer Science – Information Systems

• 6+ years experience as a Business Analyst

• Product owner at FMS

• One of the largest software companies in Latvia complying ISO 9001:2009

• ERP system Horizon, System integration, BI

• R&D laboratory

Who are persons?

• Linda Miller

• 29 years old

• Married, has no children

• Loves to travel

• Works as accountant

• Bill Johnson

• 58 years old

• Married, has 2 children and 6 grandchildren

• Loves to play poker

• Works as accountant

Who are persons?

• Actor

• Accountant

Who are we developing to?

• Some groups of people who have similar set of tasks

Who do we understand better?

Accountants in general

Real people who have a job as accountant

Who do we understand better?

Accountants in general

Real people who have a job as an

accountant

Why then do we make products for abstract user groups?

Let’s make products for

real persons

Challenge:

• All people aren’t similar – if we create a product based on requirements of a few users, others won’t like it

Solution:

• Personas – real people alike archetypes that are based on real-world data about user groups

About Personas

“The inmates are running the asylum”, 1998

Alan Cooper

Who are Personas?

• Personas look like real persons

• Personas are not real persons

• Personas are created based on motivation and behavior of real people

• Personas are created using data collected from real people by observing and exploring

Personas as well as persons have

• Photo

• Biography

• Social situation

• Dreams and personal aims

… this creates empathy.

Name

Demographic information

Motivation

Aims

Behavior

Personas as well as persons have

• Photo

• Biography

• Social situation

• Dreams and personal aims

… this creates empathy.

Name

Demographic information

Motivation

Aims

Behavior

Empathy is the ability to

understand and share another person’s feelings

4 steps creating Persona

1. Identify and fill atributes

2. Focus on goals not activities

3. Identify behavior patterns

4. Expand description

Step 1: Identify and fill attributes

Activities Attitude Aptitude

Motivation Skills

Step 2: Focus on goals not features

Step 3: Identify behavior patterns

Step 4: Expand description

How to use Personas

• To communicate requirements in a team

• To specify product behavior

• To evaluate interfaces

• For marketing purposes

The Horizon WEB 2.0

Persona based improvement

• The most popular ERP system in Latvia

– About 30% of the market,

– About 80% of the public sector

• Desktop application

• 1500 clients (public and private sector)

• More than 20 years of development

Horizon WEB

• WEB counterpart of the Horizon system

• Self-service for employees

• Some specific usages for operators covered

History of Horizon WEB

• Was developed to make some functions more accessible via WEB interface

• The functionality is expanded over time

The problem

• 20+ years of experience with ERP that is meant for advanced users

• Implementing the WEB product in similar style and interface as desktop Horizon

• Users aren’t always happy with the UI/UX of the system as it is more document oriented than user oriented

The job to do

• Find a method that allows us to transform the system from document-focused to user-focused

• Utilize that method

• Improve the UX by remaking the product

The preparation

• Goals

• Planning

• Generating ideas

• Kick-off

• Tasks

• Methods

The Personas – why?

• Several authors recommend this method as very user-centric, for example, Scott Klemmer, Marty Cagan

• Good feedback from practitioners

Our approach

• We have a lot of information about our users:

– Regular seminars and meetings

– Client requests online

– Other ways to get feedback

• This information: the basis for creating Personas

• Additional interviews for extra info and observation

Creating a list of behavioral variables

Activities

• Office based or mobile

• Percentage of activities in product domain

• Few or many parallel tasks

Attitudes • Attitude towards information systems

• Attitude towards electronic devices

Aptitudes • Education level

• Additional courses taken

Motivations

• Salary level

• Enthusiastic about work

• Workload

Skills • Computer user skills

• Communication skills

The job roles

• Choosing the relevant job roles that we build Horizon WEB for (and the ones we don’t build for)

CEO Nurse HR

manager Clerk

Continuing the work

• Process information about the subjects – chosen from various job roles

• Investigating the variable values for those roles

• Creating behavioral patterns for the roles

Synthesizing characteristics and goals

• Creating a table containing our behavioral patterns and bullet points of the characteristics and goals

Checking for redundancy and completeness

• As the roles were planned in order to be distinct, we didn’t find any redundancy

• By additional interviews found some roles missing

• Added the information about the missing roles and their behavioral patterns

Expanding description of attributes

• Adding a description about the person, a narrative

• Still containing the bullet points for completeness – a combination of both narration and structure

• A photo found in the Internet that describes the person

Assigning the persona types

• Positive personas: primary, secondary, supplemental

• Negative personas

The problem of scope

• We determined 2 primary personas

• Split the scope in two separate functional areas

Horizon WEB

Self service system

Operator’s station

Reassigning the persona types

• Splitting the persona types to both self-service and operator’s station

• Several personas are excluded from the scope of operator’s stations as they do not use this functionality

• Some personas are added as negative persons for the self-service area as they do not fit the user we’re building the self-service system for

Expanded: John the seller

• One of the described Personas: John the seller

The requirements

• Writing context scenarios for the primary and some of the secondary personas

• Their typical workday involving the usage of Horizon WEB

• Defining the requirements for improvements

The implementation

• The Horizon WEB 2.0

– New focus – the user

– New technology (WEB forms --> MVC)

• The system is modular: implementing the changes in one module at a time

The benefits

• We had a set of characteristics for the people we build the product for

• Terminology change: we develop for the personas who have names (empathy)

• The priorities of requirements are defined by the persona they’re derived from

The benefits

• User testing: we can do user testing from the viewpoint of a persona without involving real users at first

• Personas can also be used for creating marketing material

Our results

• The first round changes in first specific module: Document Circulation are already implemented and delivered to our clients

• We did:

– User testing

– Surveys

– Analysis of usage logs

Before… Circulation of a vacation request

After the remake

Further perspective

• Remaking other modules in the same way

• The personas are reusable for future projects thus making them a good tool for long term product development

Pros and challenges

• Better understanding of end users

• The personas can be used as a communication tool in the team

• The method brings results

• More analysis has to be done at first

• The thinking and development principles have to be changed

Reading & learning suggestions

• Alan Cooper: About Face 3, http://www.amazon.com/About-Face-Essentials-Interaction-Design/dp/0470084111

• Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt: The Essential Persona Lifecycle http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Persona-Lifecycle-Building/dp/0123814189

• Chris Nodder, Lynda.com course “UX Design Techniques: Creating Personas” http://www.lynda.com/Web-User-Experience-tutorials/UX-Design-Techniques-Creating-Personas/144082-2.html

• Scott Klemmer: Human-Computer Interaction, course in Coursera, started on 30.06.2014., https://www.coursera.org/course/hciucsd

Thank you for your attention