 Hi, I'm Craig Tomlin. I'm the Certified Usability Analyst and owner of UsefulUsability.com and what I wanted to talk to you today about is personas and specifically how to create personas that will be extremely helpful for user experience research and usability testing. So in the last video, I covered where persona data comes from, the primary and secondary sources of persona data, and then how to find patterns. What's next? What's next is we want to consolidate this data and we want to start looking for commonalities and patterns across the various people that we have observed. Now there's always going to be outliers and you want to get used to throwing that kind of information away. There's always going to be those edge cases and those kind of strange observations that may not necessarily fit and that's alright. We can ignore those and really focus on the core patterns that are consistent across all of the people that we observed. So things to look for. Number one, what are consistent workarounds to existing problems? For example, does everybody share the same kind of workaround to something that should be working but apparently is not? Number two, what does everybody say repeatedly about a goal or desire? You're hearing the same things over and over again and using the same terminology especially make sure that you note that. That's very important. And then number three, what consistent task flow successes or failures are shared among your end users? So are we seeing patterns where when they're trying to do something they keep tripping over certain things or are we hearing that certain actions are just not available and gosh it sure would be great if. Okay, those are important things to note to bring back as part of your persona. So now we're going to put all of that information together and we're going to create the persona but we're going to start backwards first and move toward the front. What I mean by that is most people get pretty excited and they came back from their field research and what's the first thing they do? They're going to go online and look for this picture that represents the person, then they're going to figure out what the person's name is, then they're going to start documenting some of the commonalities and ultimately they're going to end up with hopefully a documented end user success case. For UX research and especially for usability testing, I like to turn that around and start and work backwards to the front. What I mean by that is let's start with the end goal. So what ultimately is the end user wanting? What is the desired end state? Number two, we need to identify the critical tasks. For UX research and for usability testing, what are the top one to three critical tasks necessary for the end user to be successful in reaching that end goal or that end state? This identification is absolutely necessary for usability testing and user experience research. It is not as necessary for product personas or design personas where perhaps you're doing something brand new and different. So you don't have the ability, at least at this point, to do UX research or usability testing. I would ask a question though and that is, why wouldn't we want to know what the critical tasks are, right? Theoretically, we're building those into the system that we're designing. So in my opinion, you'd always kind of want to know that but be that as it may, it doesn't necessarily need to be documented if you're not doing a user experience research or a usability testing persona. Three, document your environment of use. Again, this is not always necessary for all personas. I'm not sure that Alan Cooper would agree that this is necessary for the personas he had in mind for his design exercises but for UX research and usability testing, it is extremely helpful to have an understanding of what are the common places or what are the third party tools that are consistently used or needed for this particular group of end users to be successful and to complete their desired end state. Number four, we need to document domain expertise. Again, not necessary maybe for other versions of personas but for UX research and usability testing personas it's very helpful to understand what is their familiarity with the systems, the terminology, the processes. If there is some commonality there we need to document that and we need to make sure that we understand that going into this process. As an example let's say you're doing an enterprise level claims processing system enhancement for a large insurance company. In this case knowing that anybody who uses that system will first have to go through a fairly lengthy training to become familiar with insurance terminology and the process is used for using the claims system. That equals a high domain expertise. People have to be educated on that before they can use the system. Knowing that helps us to better understand when we're putting together our user experience research and our usability testing who we need to be looking for for candidates that we want to test using this hopefully new and improved system. Number five, create a name. Be sure to be culturally sensitive. Focus on common names that are easy to remember and that can easily be used by your team. Remember that's going to be helpful for putting together this humanistic representation of a persona. And last but not least is we want to find a picture. I recommend that we find a picture that is an actual picture of somebody versus clip art or perhaps a cartoon. The reason why is humans are very visual creatures and we react very strongly to people's faces. And so it's very helpful to have the in context face and representation of the person as part of the persona. So for example if we were working on an application that allows somebody to find a lost dog or cat then it would be helpful to find a picture of a pet owner perhaps holding a dog or cat. That would be something that we as a team could come together with and say ah yes I get it that's Jane, she's the pet owner with that cat and we're developing this because her end state is to find her lost cat. Perfect. So that's an example of what to look for when putting together the persona based on the contextual inquiry that we have done. Next up things that all UX personas have in common. Number 1, the picture. Again we're very visual creatures, we humans and having that picture helps to really humanize and personify the persona. So that's a very important element. For UX research and usability testing, number 2 is critical tasks. We want to have no more than about 3. These are very important because as we're recruiting testers to do the UX research or the usability testing we want to make sure that we know what usability or user experience research tasks we are going to be asking the person to receive. It's helpful for the team to know that when they see the persona so they understand this is why we recruited these types of people it was to help us understand these kinds of critical tasks they all share in common. Number 3 is the scenario. So specific to the critical tasks we want to make sure that we have a scenario for usage and again this may not necessarily be something that would be part of a design persona a la Alan Cooper but for us doing UX research and usability testing that scenario can be very helpful. It really helps to set up the script that we'll use going into the testing. Number 4 is the background. The background for the scenario again a little bit more for the people who are going to be seeing this research after we're done with the research but it does help for the persona to have that documented so that going into it again everybody is aware on the team of why we recruited the people that we did and what the scenario of usage is for this particular UX research or usability testing. Number 6 domain expertise. I think we've already covered that. That one's important. We need to find people to match the personas from a domain expertise standpoint and then the last one number 7 is the environment so we want to understand contextually what are the devices that are being used. Is this something that's being used in an office environment only or is it something that might be used on an application in for example a train or a plane or a car that kind of environmental information can be very handy when we start putting together UX research and usability testing. So those are the 7 common types of data that are present with UX research and usability testing personas. Those are the kinds of things that I would like to see so that everybody knows going in who are recruiting what we're going to be testing, why we're testing it, and that the results of the testing are valid because we found people that matched the background and the scenarios that we are going to be engaged in testing. So again I hope that's been a helpful overview of how to actually create a persona, the information that goes into a persona, and then the commonalities between personas that we should expect to see as we're developing personas for UX research and for usability testing. So again that was a lot to cover in a short period of time. Thanks for hanging in there with me. Craig Tomlin, I am the owner of UsefulUsability.com where you can get a lot more information about personas and doing user experience research and usability testing. Feel free to follow me on my Twitter feed that is at C Tomlin, at C Tomlin, or feel free to get daily updates on all things UX research and usability related and conversion optimization related on my Facebook, that's facebook.com. And until next time, thanks. Please feel free to send me any questions about the personas. I look forward to talking to you. Take care.