How to Understand Your Users with Personas

Treehouse●Design 55 Comments

Personas are a powerful tool for helping you to better understand the needs of your users. In this comic, drawn exclusively for Think Vitamin, you’ll learn more about Personas and how they’ll revolutionize the way you design and build web sites.

Come hear Dan Cederholm, Jason Santa Maria, Joshua Davis, Bill Buxton, Daniel Burka, Elliot Jay Stocks and more speak at The Future of Web Design NYC on Nov 16 – 17th.

Personas Comic

More about Personas

Putting Personas Under the Microscope
cooper.com/journal/personas

The Origin of Personas
cooper.com/journal/2003/08/the_origin_of_personas.html

Getting from Research to Personas: Harnessing the Power of Data
cooper.com/journal/2002/11/getting_from_research_to_perso.html

Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
uie.com/articles/goodwin_interview

What’s your customer’s persona?
usatoday.com/money/smallbusiness/columnist/abrams/2005-02-18-persona_x.htm

More from Indi Young:

Book: Mental Models
rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models

Look at it Another Way
alistapart.com/articles/lookatitanotherway

More comics from Brad Colbow:

Misunderstanding Markup
smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/29/misunderstanding-markup-xhtml-2-comic-strip

Alignment in design:
sixrevisions.com/web_design/the-brads-alignment-in-design

The Brads, a weekly web comic
bradcolbow.com

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Comments

  • http://kylesteed.com Kyle Steed

    Brad, you’ve done it again. You whimsical style can bring even the dullest (yet important) topics to life. I am really enjoying this new venture you’re taking. And it’s so awesome you are able to be featured on the Carsonified blog. A big #WOOT is in order here.

  • http://www.nkbookreviews.com Nate Klaiber

    Awesome job relaying this through a fun comic, Brad. Love it.

  • http://www.uxsuccess.com Julie Booth

    Great article! Very fun. I am going to use this :)

  • http://www.fuelyourapps.com chad engle

    Brad,
    You seriously rock man. I really liked that. It was amazing. Keep up the awesome work!

  • http://chriscavallucci.com/ Chris Cavallucci

    Brad,
    Great job. I really liked subtle elements.
    Has Indi seen it?
    Cheers.

  • http://www.sparkhouse.com Dave Vogler

    Awesome! You could make some seriously effective training cartoons. Technical topics are more easily understood when presented this way. (at least for me)
    Keep up the great work!

  • http://www.justincline.com Justin Cline

    Well played, love the Ackbar reference too.

  • http://www.easilyamusedinc.com James Tryon

    Its nice to see information like this sometimes. Good Job!

  • http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models Indi Young

    I love the cauldron full of magic potion–I think that explains how most processes work are large organizations, right? Brad did a great job with the subtle hinting …

  • http://www.tyssendesign.com.au John Faulds

    What the others said: awesome work! :)

  • Neen

    just stumbled upon this content and agree with the folks above – love the easy to digest but full of goodness article. The cartoon really held my interest my better than conventional text. Look forward to reading more in future.

  • http://portenkirchner.net/ Georg Portenkirchner

    Very funny! I really liked it.

  • http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com Janko

    Awesome cartoon and great idea to present this topic!

  • http://writeforyourlife.net Iain Broome

    Great stuff. I’ve used personas plenty of times, both for marketing campaigns and for planning content for websites with multiple audiences. They can be really useful, but also flexible in the sense that there’s no one approach. Plus, a decent set of personas make explaining your ideas to clients much easier.

  • http://www.rudishumpert.com Rudi

    Great post! Spot on!

  • http://www.iaconsultants.ca Jeff Parks

    Great work Brad – love the use of comics to illustrate the value of such work. Nicely done! :)

  • Jodi Bollaert

    Brad, you have a new follower in me. This is great stuff.

  • http://johnhaydon.com John Haydon

    Brad – This is one of the freshest ways to look to the human element of web design that I’ve seen. It turns theory and research into an approach that’s accessable and fun! Thanks!

  • http://www.ryanglover.net Ryan Glover

    Quite entertaining. Glad to see some resources are attached to it as well. I’ll make note to thumb through them later. Thanks!

  • http://zacvineyard.com Zac

    This is so awesome. Thank you!

  • http://ux4dotcom.blogspot.com/ Holger

    I’m at a loss for words. GREAT GREAT GREAT – thx a lot -
    PLEASE! … Keep up this awesome work.

  • http://www.monicazapata.com Mònica

    Great! Now I’ve an incredible tool to present this method to the clients. Thanks Brad!

  • http://eugen.io Eugenio Grigolon

    Amazing job with the illustration. Very cool and relaxing. Congrats!

  • http://www.webcoursesbangkok.com Carl – Web Courses Bangkok

    HAHA loved it, specially how random people end up steering a project.

  • http://mimeblogger.com Ara

    Speechless…. Keep up this awesome work!

  • http://www.harmonysteel.com Harmony

    Clear, concise and funny, not to mention useful, thanks guys :)

  • http://www.pixtur.org pixtur

    Ah, who cares about personas. We want PONIES! :-)

  • http://www.deltacubed.co.uk deltacubed web design

    Really enjoyed this – thank you! As others have said, the comic style brings what is essentially a *slightly* dry subject to life. Top work.

  • Annika Y

    This is GREAT~ I enjoyed it a lot! Thank you:)

  • demiroush1835

    I really enjoy it. Thank for the post.
    That’s great. Nice

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  • http://vegeabc.blogspot.com Vege

    Very well said. I like the way you’ve explained it with the use of comic graphics. Awesome work. Thanks!

  • http://www.zionadvertising.net admanzion

    nice article,really awesome

  • http://www.macromedios,net Mauricio Hernandez

    Nice cartoons, very nice to understan a complex idea like that, does the personas work well when testing an interface? or just for design process?

    • http://dap6000.blogspot.com/ Derek Pennycuff

      Personas for “role playing” during usability testing is my graduate thesis topic in a nutshell. So far I’ve been able to turn up very little info on the idea. Nielsen seems to think it’s a terrible idea due to the loss of authentic user experience.

      http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050214.html

      While I respect Nielsen, his opinion isn’t the same as data.

      There’s a paper that looks at data from one of the Comparative Usability Evaluation studies (#4 I think) and they found that one team out performs expectations based on variables such as recruiting methodology, number of participants, and task coverage.

      http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1240839

      There were 2 big differences in how this team operated. 1. They took a laptop out and about in a bit of a guerrilla style rather than in a lab. 2. Participants were given a persona and a scenario to play out during their test.

      So maybe one of those elements is responsible for the increased performance. Or maybe the combination of the 2. Or maybe it’s a fluke. But it seemed like an easy enough thesis to test so I took it as my research topic. :)

      If anyone has further data on the topic, add my interest to Mauricio’s and share it here please.

  • B MB M

    mjb

    • B MB M

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  • http://www.usertesting.com Amanda McNeill

    Very fun! Here is an article from Website Magazine you may find interesting it reviews usability tools http://bit.ly/32mqlQ

    I am affiliated with usertesting.com but the article covers several tools.

    Amanda

  • Shawn

    Wondering if anyone on this thread has experience proving the ROI on persona development? How do you typically go about communicating ROI benefits within a persona pitch and then measure once the personas have been developed?

  • http://www.abhijit.shirsath.com Abhijit Shirsath

    Awesome article!

  • http://www.strawberrysoup.co.uk Neil Dennis

    Well done Brad – a thoroughly entertaining and useful article.. illustration helps to make personas easier to understand.

  • http://unistartups.slinkset.com Isaac Lewis

    As the above commenters said, I really like this as a teaching method. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes – did anyone see _why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby? Similar concepts (used comics to teach the Ruby programming language) but not quite as succesful IMO – the comics didn’t really tie in to the material.

    This is good though. Brad, I’ve just posted your website to http://unistartups.slinkset.com/ , hopefully it’ll give you a traffic boost ;)

  • http://dap6000.blogspot.com/ Derek Pennycuff

    I wanted to buy Mental Models last week, but Amazon said it was out of print. Now I’ve had an excuse to dig into it further and I see how Rosenfeld’s business model is essentially print on demand (correct me if I’m wrong) and this confuses Amazon when it comes to ideas such as “out of print”. Glad to be able to put this back on my wish list.

    The comic is awesome too, btw. :)

    • http://rosenfeldmedia.com Lou Rosenfeld

      Hi Derek, Amazon is absolutely broken, but being (essentially) a monopoly means never having to say you’re sorry.

      The book is most definitely in print, not POD (but a “real” book, with sewn bindings, four color interiors, and other great features), and can be purchased along with a digital copy here: http://www.rosenfeldmedia.com/books/mental-models/

      Or, if you must, from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk, though you’d make my day if you bought it directly from us.

      Thanks!

  • http://www.paid-surveys.org.uk/ WIll

    This is a very informative post and a very entertaining comic too, PONIES! )

  • http://www.slimming.com/appesat.html Jody

    I want a ponie too! :)

  • http://blog.bullseyecreative.net/ Rick

    Pretty fantastic, Brad. :) Our little studio just went through the rigors of coming up with and developing backgrounds on several personas for a major northwest client. (We posted about our experience here http://blog.bullseyecreative.net/customer-persona-development/)

    To be honest, it was a lot of fun and something I think the whole team looks forward to doing again. It was interesting that, based on a series of data results, patterns emerged that we were able to build into people that seemed wholly authentic. Looking back on it now, it’s still hard to believe that these people we made don’t actually exist. I think this is the reason persona use is increasing. They’re easy customers to target.

    But seriously, we need more ponies on this site. Thanks.

  • http://inthetube.ru Supoved

    Russian translation of this article:
    http://inthetube.ru/2010/04/kak-ponyat-svoix-polzovatelej-ispolzuya-personazhej/

    Hope authors don’t mind =)

  • http://www.webcreationuk.com/ WebCreationUK

    Brilliant comic mate, well done for this!

  • http://www.privilegedsoftware.com design in lincolnshire

    I really like the comic, put together really well :) I also like the design you have on the comments box very user friendly.

  • Joe

    Great illustration :)

    ‘Pony’ has been adopted at our work as the word meaning:

    “Marketing (or someone else who doesn’t understand web) has come up with a stupid idea for the website. They think it’s a brilliant idea, but it’s crap (probably an idea from before the dot-com bubble burst)”

  • Asddd

    Because of your honesty, if I was looking to buy the book, I would buy it from you (Or seriously consider it). Just thought i’d let you know.