June/July 2007

Volume 47, Number 6

Ginny Redish Gives Persona Mini-Workshop

by Al Kemp

The Society for Technical Communication's Rocky Mountain Community meeting on April 19th attracted a large audience, with members from several professional associations. Following President Deb Lockwood's welcome and community announcements, Program Manager Kristy Astry introduced Dr. Virginia (Ginny) Redish of Redish & Associates, Inc.

Dr. Redish presenting a persona mini-workshop at April's chapter meeting.

Dr. Redish has been helping colleagues and clients communicate clearly for more than 25 years. She was the founder and first director of the Document Design Center at the American Institutes for Research. Since 1992, Redish has been an independent consultant focusing on usability of documents, software, and Web sites. She is an STC Fellow, a former member of the STC Board of Directors, and co-founder of the STC Usability and User Experience Community.

Redish is co-author of two books on usability:

• A Practical Guide to Usability Testing (with Joseph Dumas)
• User and Task Analysis for Interface Design (with JoAnn Hackos)

Her new book, Letting Go of the Words, is currently at the printer.

At the April meeting, Redish gave a mini-workshop on "Persona-based, Scenario-based Heuristic Evaluation." The best way to find out how well your product works is to do usability testing. When you can't, personas help you get as close as possible to usability testing.

A persona is a description of a fictional person who represents a major group of users for whom you are developing a product. A persona is not an actual user. A persona should be based on a composite of several users you have observed, interviewed, or known as well as on demographics, goals and tasks, values, and context of use. A "persona poster" helps product development personnel relate to a persona. The persona poster might include:

• Name
• Photo
• Job title or major characteristic
• Job description
• Quotes
• Demographics
• Technology the person uses
• Typical goals, tasks, and scenarios
• Needs, frustrations, and values

A scenario is a short story about a person coming to a product with a goal, task, need, or question. For example, a persona might be Jim Reese, and the product he is working with might be a personal printer. The scenario: Jim has been working all evening on a report for his boss. He is tired. While printing the report, the printer jammed. Unable to clear the paper jam on his own, he has gone to the manufacturer's Web site for help.

Heuristics are principles, things we know about how people work and think about good design. A heuristic evaluation is a product review according to relevant heuristics.

On a recent consulting job, Redish was asked to review a Web site. Rather than sending the client a critique of the Web site, which the developers might disregard, she arranged to meet with the developers and have them present their work. She asked them to describe typical users. They told Redish that a typical user was a female administrative employee in her mid-20s with a high-school education. Without knowing it, the developers had created a mini persona. They named their persona Suzie. Redish asked the developers to describe what Suzie did. They replied that she uses the Web site to put new users into the system, assign user privileges, and so on. As soon as Redish introduced the developers to the persona of Suzie, they started to review the Web site's screens based on their knowledge of the persona.

Redish then had the audience work together in groups to develop personas and scenarios for three case studies. In the case study for an Australian Web site on "New Requirements for Mailing Food to the U.S.," one group developed a persona named Grandma Eleanor. The scenario: Grandma Eleanor wants to mail food to her grandson Jonathan, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Grandma Eleanor goes to the Web site, she can't find answers to her questions about what food she is permitted to send and how she should send it. During the exercise, Redish pointed out that every use of a Web site is a conversation with the Web site by a person with a question. The Australian Web site should be reworked to answer questions and provide instructions.

Following the three case studies, Redish observed: "Using personas and scenarios will change your documents and Web sites utterly." She then opened the presentation to questions from the audience. In response to a question about problems with personas who don't represent users, she replied, "It's very important to realize if you don't have user data, you're working from assumptions. Real persons — real users — are always better than hypothetical personas. But not doing personas results in problems like the ones we have seen in the case studies." When asked where to get the information required to develop personas, Redish suggested, "Go out and read the literature. There are medical studies, psychological studies, actual usability studies. Go out and meet real people. Talk to people who actually see users: the support staff, the sales staff." Redish concluded the mini-workshop with a warning: "Formal research is the way to go. But personas help. Not doing anything puts us back in non-user-centered design.