Persona Format

Fluid Persona Format

This persona format was created to organize information in the Fluid Personas. The format chosen was based on the 11850928 of many persona examples below.

Page 1: Summary

 Page 2: More Details

Comparative Analysis

Todd Warfel Example Persona

From: http://www.slideshare.net/toddwarfel/data-driven-personas

Positives

1. Nice categorization: "The Moderately Seasoned Professional"
2. Nice tagline: "I'd like to see a good, better, best."
3. Shows Persona scales
4. Goals are prominent
5. Important Use cases highlighted in "Primary Use"
6. Frustrations & Pain Points are prominent
7. Succinct narrative story about what's important to Michael
8. Great picture

Negatives

1. Persona doesn't have a ton of personal details, so he may not be as humanized as he could be. (But maybe he's compelling enough without those details.)

Chopsticker Example Persona

PDF version of Timothy Powell Persona

Positives

1. Nice graphic design
2. Very compelling picture
3. Very interesting personal details that give you a sense of his personality ("I don't suffer fools!), but relate very well to his work context
4. Goals are prominent (interesting tying of goals to a story about them)
5. The second page is sort of an appendix with additional details

Negatives

1. Tagline is a little long
2. Details in the left sidebar aren't arranged very well (no headings)
3. Not super easy to get an "at a glance" sense of who he is

From: http://chopsticker.com/2007/06/08/download-an-example-persona-used-in-the-design-of-a-web-application/

Kivio Persona Chart

From: http://wiki.openusability.org/kivio/index.php/Personas

Positives

1. A chart can be an interesting companion to personas, to help us understand their differences
2. Table format allows users to easily see how the personas are different
3. Table format allows users to easily pick out the information that is relevant to them
4. Table format allows for the breakdown of information into the categories that are important to the application/site being designed; may be good when there is a lot of important information which is paralleled among the personas
5. Personal/social life is included, but in the table format can be ignored or skimmed

Negatives

1. The table format makes it less story-like, and thus perhaps less compelling

Cooper Personas

From: http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition3/portal_process.asp

Positives

1. Drawings can be used for provisional personas to further emphsize the fact that they are not based on research (and thus less "real")
2. The drawings of the cars they want really add a tangible example of their differences
3. Actual Cooper Personas appear to be about 4 paragraphs of text with a name, age, and perhaps one other characteristic (e.g. email) at the top. I think this is a (less digestible) format that works for them because the personas are primarily used by their internal design team, or shared with clients in a very interactive session. I don't think they have to convince people to use them as much as we (or many other organizations) do.

Negatives

1. Clearly, these aren't full personas and a lot more detail is needed

Viget Labs Persona

http://www.viget.com/advance/why-personas-are-valuable/

Positives

1. Nice photo
2. Nice tagline
3. Nice categorization: "The busy student"
4. Simple but effective graphic design
5. Quick Stats gives you "at a glance" demographic info on Jack
6. Goals are prominent
7. List of tasks (sort of scenarios) user may want to perform on the site

Negatives

1. Pretty bare-bones; not a lot of information
2. He isn't really humanized; it seems more like a user profile.

Persona for Student Assistant Tool

From: http://uxevolved.com/interfaceDesign.html

Positives

1. I think you do get a sense of what Mark is like despite the lack of narrative detail. There is enough narrative in each section to humanize him.
2. Nice photo

Negatives

1. No categorization of Mark (E.g. "the social drinker")
2. Is Education & Education Overview really necessary
3. Why are technology usage and cell usage separated?
4. Not sure if it makes sense to make hobbies so prominent..could be part of Personal Info
5. Tagline may be a little contrived

Engine Service Design Example Personas

From: http://www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_design/m_page/personas

Comments

1. These seem similar to ours, with different sections for Ambitions, Interests & Challenges.
2. Can't see enough to comment on positives or negatives.

Engine Service Design - Filling in a Persona Board

From: http://www.enginegroup.co.uk/service_design/m_page/personas

Positives

1.  Interesting activity for persona creation. I believe they have the "magical services" that Cooper asks you to think about in design.

Negatives

1. Are people limited by having to write in boxes with the questions already laid out?

Razorfish Persona

From: http://bobulate.com/documents/scenarios.pdf

Positives

1. Nice categorization: "The Learner"
2. Nice tagline
3. Good combination of narrative paragraphs and bulleted lists (though I think the bulleted lists could be chosen a bit better)
4. Includes very well-fleshed out scenarios

Negatives

1. Attributes seem somewhat repetitive of Background
2. Classical print design layout may alienate folks more acclimated to "use all the space" projector and screen targeted layouts.

iQContent Persona Example

From: http://www.iqcontent.com/publications/features/article_75/

Positives

1.  Wow, is he ever humanized!

Negatives

1. You need to read the whole thing to really know him
2. A tagline or Categorization may help to remember him 'at a glance'
3. Not sure how this connects to a product being designed for him

Small Portion of a Larger U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service (ERS) Persona

From: http://www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html

Positives

1. Nice picture
2. Nice tagline
3. Nice narrative summary of what Matthew does

Negatives

1. Demographic info is lumped into a short section which also includes tech-savvyness
2. Goals are missing, or labeled as "Key Attributes"

Sakai & Image Gallery Personas

Eileen - Primary persona Image Gallery 

Persona Format 

Persona Format 

Positives

1. Low cost for development
2. Persona map makes it clear who is primary and how the others fall around her
3. High level description about show she is
4. Nice goals, relevant to product
5. Can utilize the format created for image gallery in the wiki
6. Like the way "Level of (technical) expertise" and Tools are broken out

Negatives

1. Not a lot of details about how she gets her work done 
2. Not as "snazzy" looking as some others
3. Not a great "at a glance" view

Fluid Personas

Catalina (more sectioned version)

Comments

1. I really like the short introductory paragraph at the beginning, with a called out quote (though the quote may be a little too emphasized).
2. There are several called out quotes here, so we'd want to make sure her tagline is the most prominent.
3. If there is similar information in the narrative paragraphs and the bulleted lists, I think we want to eliminate it so people don't have to parse the same info twice (unless we do two different formats of each persona, one narrative and one bulleted).
4. I'm not sure the red headings work. Both because I think red is a bit of a danger color, and because it's hard to tell at first glance that the red heading is at a higher level than the black headings in the bulleted sections.
    
5. We may want to see if we can reduce the # of bullets a bit.
6. Are there other categories that would be helpful in the bulleted sections?
7. I'd move the "Professor & TA Manager in Spanish under her picture, because the name is what we want to really emphasize.
    

• Catalina De Silva (Faculty - GSI Manager in Spanish)- Persona Format
• Robin McCoy (Faculty - Business School)
• Ahmad Yousef (Faculty - Tenure-track History)
• Sergio Rossi (Graduate Teaching Assistant - Urban Affairs & Planning)
• Stacey Pearson (Graduate Teaching Assistant - Microbiology)
• Henry Sibley (Longtime Faculty - Math, Provisional Persona)
• George McFadden (Online Instructor - Journalism)

 
Student

• Christy Gonzola (Undergraduate Student - Molecular & Cell Biology)
• Andy Wright (Graduate Student - Information Studies)
• Ashley Myles (Undergraduate Student - Archeology)
• Shaina Wiseman (Graduate Student - Land Development, Provisional Persona)

Instructional Support Staff

• Michael Demsky (Departmental Support - Biology)
• Anita Stalmach (Departmental Pedagogy Support - Instructional Designer)