User Profiles

Often called personas, user profiles are fictitious yet representative descriptions of users and possibly other stakeholders. Many trace use of profiles or personas to Alan Cooper's book The Inmates are Running the Asylum. Here's an article where Cooper discusses the beginnings of his work.

Sources of information

• Based on previous knowledge of users and domain
• Informal discussions or interviews with clients, stakeholders and potential users
• Product and organization documents
• Formal interviews and surveys

Also some approaches use iterative feedback from the first two sources.

Identifying who to profile

Strategies:

• Clustering based on attributes
• Using organizational categories (e.g. staff, faculty, students)

Profile attributes for clustering and descriptions

Kuniavsky provides listings of attributes on pp. 135 - 143. Here's my (more consolidated) list:

• Traditional demographics
• Equipment and other artefacts
• Environment
• Knowledge
• Domain knowledge
• Product knowledge
• General technical knowledge (including web usage)
• Goals, needs, desires, tasks
• Values, attitudes and general interests

Examples and Links

• Personas at Usability.gov
• An introduction to personas and how to create them.
• Personas at Cisco. This article presents the process at Cisco for making personas compelling to engineers.
• Grudin and Pruitt article on personas. These HCI practitioners at Microsoft present advantages to using personas while also cautioning that they need to be supported by user research.

Also, Kuniavsky provides an example on p. 155.

Challenges and drawbacks

• One instance represents a whole segment of users
• Validity (accuracy) of the profile
• Requires focus on useful elements for design
• Method using stories about fictitious people lacks credibility in some circles

Issues for discussion

• Why personas work (or why they are so popular)
• Strategies for addressing challenges and drawbacks