Benefits
According to Pruitt and Adlin (2006), the use of personas offers several benefits in product development (cf. Grudin and Pruitt, 2002; Cooper, 1999). Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Such inference may assist with brainstorming, use case specification, and features definition. Pruitt and Adlin argue that personas are easy to communicate to engineering teams and thus allow engineers, developers, and others to absorb customer data in a palatable format. They present several examples of personas used for purposes of communication in various development projects.
Personas also help prevent some common design pitfalls which may otherwise be easy to fall into. The first is designing for what Cooper calls "The Elastic User" — by which he means that while making product decisions different stakeholders may define the 'user' according to their convenience. Defining personas helps the team have a shared understanding of the real users in terms of their goals, capabilities and contexts. Personas also help prevent "self referential design" when the designer or developer may unconsciously project their own mental models on the product design which may be very different from that of the target user population. Personas also provide a reality check by helping designers keep the focus of the design on cases that are most likely to be encountered for the target users and not on edge cases which usually won't happen for the target population. According to Cooper, edge cases which should naturally be handled properly should not become the design focus (Cooper, 1999).
The benefits are summarized as (Cooper, 1999):
- Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups. Data about the groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
- Proposed solutions can be guided by how well they meet the needs of individual user personas. Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.
- Provide a human "face" so as to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.
Read more about this topic: Persona (marketing)
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