I started a redesign last month of our French corporate website and introduced the concept of personas. I organised a meeting and started with a presentation explaining what personas really are and how we could use them.
In the beginning the people in the room felt a bit awkward but in the end I got them telling stories about customers. I asked them to create mashups of customers they knew and mixed this information into personas. I got 18 personas out of the meeting and I consider the meeting a real success.
One of the things that started the people was my persona form sheet. I created a simple form that I could hand out. After my presentation everybody could fill out the paper form and create a basic persona. The form is based on the questions and suggestions from the persona toolbox George Olsen published in 2004.
I started the form with background questions; general information: gender, name, profession, age, location, interests or studies. The next thing is computer usage. This is difficult to know and I matched this information with the info from log files I have from the webserver (The Mac browser Safari doesn’t exist, strange but true).
The business relation part is about what type of client this is. If he/she is an important client, big client, small client. How many of these clients do we have or would like to have on our website.
The next sections, “Usage goals”, “Specific needs” are free form and this section needed a little talking. I asked to think about clients and why they would need a website. To convince their bosses? To find information about a product? A contact number? Etc …
The last section, “Context” is about the reason why the client would come to the website, where he works and how much time he/she would spend on the website and if he ever comes back to the website.
At this point I got all the forms and a lot of people looking at me. They were not sure what was expected and if they actually helped me. Then I asked each one of them to present the persona they had written down. I asked to tell a story in front of everyone. This allowed the others to review their own personas and see what was wrong, missing, or useless and correct these things if possible.
I was surprised what the people told me about their customers. You know, creating personas is not about being politically correct.
The form helped so if you want to use the form, download it [VISIO], print it [PDF] and rearrange it.Let me know if it helped you in getting the information you needed.
