Facibus Reviews

Lisa Reichelt puts a good case forward for the use of personas. Like Lisa, I find them an excellent tool for communicating design concepts and validating requirements - to developers as well as end users. Personas, like any other deliverable, can be done in light- and heavy-weight ways.

Personas tell a story - generally, the story of a representative business client performing a task that is enabled/provided by the new system/methodology/job description under design. At their simplest, they are a paragraph of text that uses storytelling to highlight a particular point. Oversimplification is dangerous, but I maintain that:

1. if you have domain knowledge, you can do a lot with a paragraph dashed off in five minutes, and
2. any personas so produced will be better than no personas at all.

Now let me qualify those two points.

If you have the domain knowledge…
This is an important point. If you don’t know the environment (the as-is state) and the proposed change (the to-be state) backwards, your five minute personas will look bad and create distrust (and this is one danger of five minute personas, see “When is it inappropriate to write a five minute persona?” below). But if you know the audience and something of their hopes/fears/ways of doing business, you can judge not only what they need to see in the persona, but whether they will be receptive to it in this form.

Any personas so produced will be better than no personas at all
OK, so based on qualifier one (if you have the domain knowledge), why is any persona so produced better than no persona at all? Because they are a simple way of synchronising the understanding that you have with both the system developers/integrators and business clients. If they can’t see themselves either providing what you describe or undertaking it, then there is a miscommunication somewhere. So either the persona is wrong, the business analyst got the requirements wrong, or there is a breakdown in the change management process.

How do you write the five minute persona?
This is the easy bit. There are three key parts to any five minute persona:

• Environment: Where is it happening?
• The actor: Who is performing the action? What else do they do that is related to this action within this system? Please note that I’m using “system” here in the holistic sense - like I said above, it could as easily be a methodology.
• The action: this is where scope comes into it- whether the persona is high level (related to the whole system under change) or at a low task-centric or even step-centric level. My suggestion is that you have scope very firmly in mind before you start writing, and then work with it.

And if you really want it to be a five minute persona:

• keep it atomic: one paragraph is all you get for one main point, one key concept, one idea to be conveyed. One.
• keep it brief: any idea that takes more than 2-300 words to convey to people with domain knowledge is not just one idea - break it down.
• keep it to the point: five minutes does not allow for any piffle, fancy three-dollar words, or any other form of literary tomfoolery. Write to inform, not impress.
  

When is it inappropriate to write a five minute persona?
There are times when it is inappropriate to write five minute personas. They include:

• When you don’t have the trust of the audience: this is vaguely covered above, but I will reiterate it - if you don’t think that your audience will respond positively to the concept of a five minute persona, don’t use them.
• When you don’t have domain knowledge
• When you can’t adequately convey the temporary nature of the persona: if you will have to explain to your boss why your quick piece of work is being used as an example of slipshod work by a senior client manager because it is all that they can find six months after the engagement has finished, you have a problem - maybe the client site document management system is not up to scratch, maybe you didn’t get to follow up in person with key stakeholders, or maybe you didn’t adequately explain the design process to everyone. If you can’t get people to understand that the five minute persona is a snapshot in time that centres on one key message, then do it the long way.

And lastly, a riddle: When is a persona not a persona?
Easy - when it is a story you tell around a prototype. The power of storytelling cannot be understated - spend a couple of minutes delivering a verbal persona to set the scene for a prototype and you will get better value from both the prototype and the persona. I learnt this powerful technique from my SMS mentor Stephen Hall. It works.

In a later posting I’ll cover writing detailed personas - for now, if in doubt, give five minute personas a try if you think they might help. The results may surprise you.