The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
By John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin

Morgan Kaufmann (April 24, 2006), 744 pages
ISBN: 978-0125662512

STC UUX Community Newsletter
Usability Interface

Book Review:
The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
By John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin

Reviewed by David Dick

If you are involved with designing and developing products and services for people, you know the importance of keeping the user (people) in mind throughout the product design. Designing for the users without involving real users is pointless. If you cannot involve the users, you can imagine them and create a personality to each and every one of them. Welcome to the next frontier for user-centered design: personas. If you want how to create and use personas to design products that people love I encourage you to read The Persona Lifecycle.

The Persona Lifecycle describes the value of personas, and offers detailed techniques and tools to conceive, create, communicate, and use personas to create [great] product designs. John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin provide examples, samples, and illustrations for persona practitioners to imitate and model. It is important to emphasize that the use of personas is a method that compliments other user-centered design techniques, including user testing, scenario-based design, and cognitive walkthroughs.

Personas are not always successful as a design solution, as the authors readily admit. That is why Pruitt and Adlin wrote The Persona Lifecycle : to provide solutions to some of the common problems practitioners have experienced when trying to create and use personas. The book begins with an introduction to personas (Chapter 1), followed by an overview of the persona lifecycle (Chapter 2), and five core chapters (Chapters 3 through 7) that cover the phases of the persona lifecycle.

In addition, the leading usability, Human-Computer Interaction, and customer experience experts have contributed the following chapters to this book:

• Larry Constantine: “Users, Roles, and Personas” introduces user roles in the context of usage-centered design and explores the relationships between user roles and personas. I found this chapter of particular interest because I am learning how to create use cases as a method of identifying system requirements. Giving the actors (users) personalities makes the use cases and tasks (roles) more meaningful.

• Whitney Quesenbery: “Storytelling and Narrative” provides guidelines to create a story, the elements of a good story, and the techniques to craft a story. A well-crafted story helps the design team to establish a situation or context, illustrate a problem or a positive experience, and propose a new solution for personas.

• Tamara Adlin and Holly Jamesen Carr: “Reality and Design Maps” describe how to create artifacts that help the design team to understand and communicate information about the ways that people achieve their goals and the ways they could achieve their goals with new tools.

• Jonathon Grudin: “Why Personas Work: The Psychological Evidence” describes the relationship of personas to the practice of marketing. Primarily, how to get the most from personas you have created to inform product design by looking for ways they can contribute to marketing and suggestions on how to create personas for marketing purposes.

• Bob Barlow-Busch: “Marketing Versus Design Personas” compares and contrasts the use of personas in marketing and design. Simply stated, a marketing persona tells the story of someone deciding to purchase a product, and a design persona tells the story of someone using it: one is a customer and the other is a user. The main purpose of a marketing persona is to understand the factors that influence people’s purchase of products.

Each chapter is supported by testimonials from corporate presidents, handy details (important reminders, useful definitions, and a running case study that connects all of the lifecycle phases; and concludes with a summary that revisits key topics to prepare the reader for the next phase of persona development.

What I appreciate about this book is that it is wholly dedicated to the personas. Pruitt and Adlin have been researching and using personas, leading workshops, and teaching courses at professional conferences and universities. They developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals, and became the inspiration for this book. I should mention that since the publication of this book in April 2006, Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar have published The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (VOICES).

If you want to learn the techniques to inject accurate information about real users into the chaotic world of product development, you will find The Persona Lifecycle essential reading and a must have for your library.