 Hi, I'm Craig Tomlin, I'm a certified usability analyst and I'd love to talk about and blog about all things usability, user experience design, marketing, conversion optimization related on my website, usefulusability.com, and what I want to talk to you today about is personas. A subject I think is very, very important, probably doesn't get enough press needs to because personas are mission critical to a successful user experience design, to research into usability or UX, even doing things like marketing communications, without a persona it's all just kind of guesswork. So personas are very important, we're going to cover that in several videos. So let's start it off with, first off, well what is a persona? Second is the types of personas, and then the important thing is why should I care about personas, what's in it for me, Craig? So we're going to cover that in this video too. So just a little bit about me, I'm a certified usability analyst with 20 years experience in the user experience usability, marketing categories and industries, I've been doing a lot of blogging on my site, usefulusability.com, you can follow me on Twitter, I'm at C Tomlin and you can also follow my Facebook page. So let's get right into it. What's a persona? Well, a persona is a fictional representation of a set of users that all share a common critical task. And it's that sharing common critical tasks that defines personas for user experience research and user experience development and user center design from personas that do not necessarily have those critical tasks defined. And so let's talk about that. So there's really two types of personas. If you go to Google and you were to search for personas and you look in the images, you'll see thousands of images, thousands of images, all shapes, all sorts, all sizes, and they all have to do with different types of personas. And there's a lot of confusion about these kinds of personas. So let's kind of cut through that and now I'll explain to you what the two basic groups of personas are. First off, there is the user center design personas. And again, something that should always be part of a user center design persona is a shared set of critical tasks, because those critical tasks are really what we're designing for or what we're researching to optimize for. The other group, so that's the user center designer. The other group is the marketing group or maybe the product marketing group or the product development group. They have personas too, and those personas are almost identical with the one major little asterisk being that those personas don't necessarily have critical tasks associated with them. And a lot of times those personas will also come from demographic data and profiles that our marketing teams have put together or development teams have put together to define a set of users for either a software or a marketing communication. So that's the two different groups. One is user center design, again, common critical tasks. And the other is personas that might be used for marketing or development related kinds of activities. Let's talk next about, well, that's great. So I know what a persona is and what types of personas in general. So why do I care about a persona? What's in it for me, right? Well, the answer to that is three important things. First, design decisions cannot be made if you don't have an agreed upon target user for whatever it is you're building, be it an application, software, hardware, doesn't really matter. There needs to be common critical tasks that all of these users are sharing. And you're designing to make sure that those critical tasks are as easy to do as possible. So that's very, very important. And personas help you to do that. The way that a persona does that is if everybody agrees that, well, this is our persona, I'll make up the name Mary. And Mary has this critical task that she needs to do. Then as we're developing our website or as we're developing our noble application, we know we have to focus on making that critical task as easy for Mary to do as possible. And so that really helps teams, when they start designing and developing, to go through and make those yes and no decisions on, is this something that will help Mary get that critical task done yes or no? And so that is very helpful, again, for cutting through the clutter of design decisions. Let's talk about the next one. The next one is quality checks. So if you're in an agile process and you're going through some fairly quick sprints, you're trying to start developing out some functionality and features. One of the things you can do as you're going through that process, and by the way, I should mention this works for Waterfall as well, is quality checks. Look back as you're going through your process and say, okay, well, are the things that we're working on and are the things that we're building out still on target with getting Mary her critical tasks successfully accomplished? If they are great, wonderful, moving forward. If there's some quality issues with that critical task or there's things happening that may change the nature of that critical task, then those are important points to actually stop and think, okay, are we still in the right path or not? So good quality checks can be accomplished through the use of the persona. And then the third thing, and another important thing, especially for development teams is scope creep. Personas are great if used properly to help reduce scope creep. So scope creep, I'm pretty sure you're familiar with what that is. You have a project. Somebody has a great idea. They want to add this piece on here or both on that piece there. Maybe they want to change this over here. And that happens, right? Teams get together, they have great ideas, projects like Morph. And scope creep usually is where projects can really get bogged down. So the idea is to use your persona as being that check against scope creep. Go back to that, Mary and say, okay, so the new features or the new functionality that we're now talking about that we're thinking about adding on, is this going to help Mary get that critical task or that set of critical tasks done? If yes, great, okay, then maybe the scope creep is worthy and we should go forward and do it. If we're not quite so sure, then okay, then maybe what we do is we build this functionality or this feature out later as part of another iteration of a project that we're working on. So those are kind of the three reasons why you need personas. And if you use personas properly and you have a very good persona, I can honestly say I've seen teams really move much faster and much better, both from a user research perspective as well as from a development and design perspective. So personas, mission critical, I think now you know why, you know what a persona is, right, fictional representation of a typical user who all share a common set of critical tasks. You know the types of personas, the two general types of personas, and you know why you need personas. So thank you for watching. If you have any questions you want more information, please feel free to visit my website. It's usefulusability.com. You can follow me on Twitter at C. Tomlin and certainly follow my Facebook page. Love to see you there. I do daily updates on all things user experience, usability, conversion optimization. So thanks for watching. Have a great day.