How I Go About Creating Personas
I’m a novice at personas. I mean, I’ve written some stories before– novels in High School– but I don’t know that I’ve ever been really good with biographies.
Most of the time my biography consists of what my characters have done in my stories– and I know that they should have a good back story, but like any programmer that loves jumping into code rather than spending all his time trying to do the design work1, I need work in this area.
So, with this latest project, I went about finding images first that I could use for characters. Having an account at StockExchange (a free stock photography site) I headed on over there to look through “portraits.” There weren’t many, but I found a few that would fit my need.
My next step was to write two or three paragraphs that described them and their job function. For my purposes I’m not sure just how much biography outside of their work lives I needed. I included a little, but perhaps I’m a bit naive when it comes to purpose. I’m sure I’ll learn.
After that, I scribbled a little out about what I thought they wanted from the system as a guide to thinking about how to do the design.
I’m struggling, a little, on how to differentiate the product I am analyzing and the product that I want in my head.
Perhaps Personas work better when you’re in a group having a discussion?
Perhaps I need to start doing a design and see if I please my virtual people?
Except Karie isn’t defined yet. Until she’s defined, I think I won’t have a complete picture.
Down the road I expect to use some of the characters from my fiction stories (as they have an exhaustive background and cooler photos), but for now, I’ll stick with what I have.
- I mean, I know that I should do it, it’s just the case that I love coding! [↩]
