User Persona & Scenario

Jenna on 02 17, 2010

Definition

A Persona identifies a specific type of user by creating a fictional person with ethnographic details, – a given name, gender, age, education, interests, work description, etc.

It is related to but not the same as market segmentation, where typical customers are identified.

Personas are created from User Research – Ethnographic Research interviews of real users – by clustering the characteristics of important representative users into fictional characters. The aim is to include all the important characteristics in at least one of the personas.

The Persona is used by the Information Design team to help imagine how real users will react to a design. Each persona has clear needs or goals that help the designers look at the project from a point of view different from their own.

Specific tasks or goals may also be identified as a Use Case or Scenario. Then the User Experience Engineer may try to imagine how each Persona would accomplish the tasks or goals described in the Scenario.

The Persona also allows a sort of virtual User Research, before getting to the real users.

From: IA Institute Glossary, Learn more: http://iainstitute.org/en/learn/resources/glossary.php

Sample Deliverables