Creating a persona Computer skills Age Motivation to purchase Tendency to compare prices Likely to use review sites Swayed by advertising One way to create personas is to plot a variance of user attributes along scales, and see how users cluster. In the above diagram, each shade represents a different user; purple and orange highlight the clusters. This implies two user types you would explore further. Note there is lots more going on behind the scenes here; this is only a whistlestop tour. Computer skills Age Size of music collection Variance in styles Likes album art Attends many gigs/concerts If there are no key differentiators between all your users, you’ll end up with useless, vague perso- nas. 16-55, college-educated, good sense of humor, and other useless criteria. If a persona could be used to describe everyone you know, you can rip it up. If it’s identical to the last ten personas your design team has produced, then you’ve a problem. Good intuition beats bad data. So bad personas happen because: • Insufficient or poor research has been done. • Personas are the wrong tool for the job. When personas yield nothing Some products are better defined by the job they do than the customers they serve. For some prod- ucts, customers come in all shapes and sizes, from all countries, all backgrounds, all salaries, and all levels of computer skills. The only thing in common is the job they need to get done. In these cases, it’s best to get an intimate understanding of the job itself, what creates demand for it, and what you’d hire to do the job. 7