 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 what a Persona is, the types of Personas and why Personas are important. This video we're going to actually get in and make a Persona. So the first thing to realize when dealing with UX research Personas is they can be a little bit different from a typical Persona that for example a product team may use. The difference specifically for UX research and usability testing Personas is we have to have critical tasks associated with a Persona. This will make more sense a little bit later and I'll explain why. So let's get right into it. First off, Persona information, where does that come from? Well the only way to really create a good Persona and I'm going to Alan Cooper who's the father of Personas if you will is to actually get up, get out of your office and go out to wherever your end users are and spend time with them, observing them, listening to them, etc. So that is very important. They call it contextual inquiry and that's a mouthful but really what that means is going out into the environment that your end users are at and understanding from their side of the experience what they're going through when they're either using a software or tool, an application or hardware. So primary source of data is contextual inquiry, very, very important. So getting out of the office. The next step is if you are out of the office what do you do? Well you have to observe, you have to listen to your users, you have to take notes, you have to let your end user do most if not all of the talking and that is very, very important because you are observing and capturing information. You're not really out there to interview the user in terms of hey we thought of this great new app, would you like to use it? No, no, no. It's not that at all. We do need to observe the actual users and make sure that we understand and are listening to them as they're explaining to us how they're either attempting to use a system or thinking about using a system. So the observation is very, very important. Probing and following up. So for example if somebody says, you know, I like this thing because it's easy for me to use. Okay great. Then ask them, okay why? Why is it easy for you to use? Drill down into the motivations and the actions that ultimately cause satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the way that they are doing something. The next thing is to make sure you are asking open-ended questions. So you always want to be using questions that start with why, what, how, and you always want to stay away from close-ended questions. Do you, would you, is this? And the reason for that is we want the end user to be talking. We really don't want to get into this situation where we're presenting them with a choice and forcing them to choose. That's not the right way to do this at all. So now that you understand how to grab that information in contextual inquiry, let's talk about the next piece of it. There are secondary sources of information you can use but I want to be clear about this. They are secondary sources and they are only used to provide what I would consider to be some color commentary to the primary source of information which is that field research, that contextual inquiry. So given that asterisk, let's get into secondary sources. Website or app behavior can be a great source of secondary information for your persona. If it's an existing website or an existing application there's a variety of data available that shows the actual behaviors today. The second one is focus groups and surveys. This is, I would say, farther down the spectrum. You have to be careful with focus groups. You have to be careful with surveys because what we have found time and time again is what users say they will do or say they believe is not actually what they do or what they believe. So be careful with that. But in the proper situation in a non-biased fashion that could be good and helpful information for a UX research or usability testing. The third one is feedback and voice of the customer data. Again, be a great source of secondary information for what the users are going through, what their problems are, especially the feedback tool. For example, a website, maybe an e-commerce flow can be a great tool where you can start seeing the commonality of experiences and the expressions of how those experiences are going in certain parts of an e-commerce flow as an example. So that can be a great way to get information. So let's stop a second now and let's consider that we've captured all of this data and all of this information. 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.