Product Description

If you design and develop products for people, this book is for you. The Persona Lifecycle addresses the "how" of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesn't just describe the value of personas; it offers detailed techniques and tools related to planning, creating, communicating, and using personas to create great product designs. Moreover, it provides rich examples, samples, and illustrations to imitate and model. Perhaps most importantly, it positions personas not as a panacea, but as a method used to complement other user-centered design (UCD) techniques including scenario-based design, cognitive walkthroughs and user testing.

John Pruitt is the User Research Manager for the Tablet & Mobile PC Division at Microsoft Corporation. Tamara Adlin is a Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com. For the past six years, John and Tamara 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.

Features
* Presentation and discussion of the complete lifecycle of personas, to guide the designer at each stage of product development.
* A running case study with rich examples and samples that demonstrate how personas can be used in building a product end-to-end.
* Recommended best practices in techniques, tools, and innovative methods.
* Hundreds of relevant stories, commentary, opinions, and case studies from user experience professionals across a variety of domains and industries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #287231 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 744 pages

Review
"Personas personified. The definitive word on why personas are better than people in guiding your designs. Filled with case histories, sidebars, and helpful, useful guidelines as well as deep, penetrating analyses. A big book, and for reason. This book is unique in that it is truly for everyone: the practitioner, the researcher, and the teacher. Did I say this was essential reading? Well, it is: if you use personas, if you have thought about using them, if you don't even know what they are, this is the book for you." - Don Norman, author of Emotional Design and The Design of Everyday Things

"Personas are powerful design tools, which are that much more dangerous if they are grounded in weak methodology. Pruitt and Adlin show you how to do personas right and how to base them on real user data. Follow their advice or risk disaster." Jakob Nielsen, author of Usability Engineering and Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity

About the Author
John Pruitt is a User Research Manager for the Tablet and Mobile PC Division at Microsoft Corporation. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research for a number of products including Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, and MSN Explorer, versions 6, 7 & 8. Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory, in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published articles and chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than five years, continually developing a more rigorous approach to the method and mentoring numerous product teams at Microsoft and companies worldwide in adopting the technique. John has led workshops and spoken widely on the topic at both academic and industry events.

Tamara Adlin is the Principal consultant at Adlin, Inc. She was formerly a Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com. For the past six years, John and Tamara 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.

Customer Reviews

One of THE HCI Resource Books for Your Shelf
I should admit my bias up front. There are those who like little short books that make one point and make it over and over. There are many popular books in our field that are like that, filled with stories that all basically make the same point and are just a couple of hundred pages long. They are heavy on fun reading and pithy quotes, and light on meat. If my company doesn't buy them for me, I usually like to borrow these, read the first chapter and last chapter and skim the rest.

The Persona Lifecycle is the other kind of book. It is a book that is large because it is packed with information and ideas. It is big, because the topic is big. It is organized in a way that lets you take it down from the shelf and just read the bits that are relevant to the problem you have at the time. Are you trying to figure out how to get started? Are you trying to figure out how to engage your organization in the effort, and in user-centered design through the use of personas? Are you trying to figure out how to make your personas more effective? Are you trying to figure out how to drive more business value out of them? There is something for every situation.

There isn't just one way to get value from personas, and so a checklist or cookbook isn't appropriate. What are appropriate are principles that can be used to figure out an approach for a particular context, and lots of examples.

Furthermore, it is a book that doesn't just live in the world of theory, or pontificating about a point of view in order to justify a consulting business. It is a book that is filled with practical advice and the experiences of those who are using personas in their jobs.

This is a must-have resource for the HCI professional's shelf.

The persona book that every design professional and academic researcher needs
I have been anxiously awaiting a "how-to" book on personas since Alan Cooper's 1999 book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum." This book by Tamara and John not only covers in detail all the "how-tos" of persona creation and use, but also talks about why personas are effective. The chapters about storytelling and the psychological aspects of personas provide concrete and insightful evidence for why personas are an effective approach to user-centered design.

The book is well written, clearly organized, and a very easy read. Also, the use of case studies and stories from the field expand on the book's contents, and provide some interesting examples of how personas are being used today.

I strongly recommend this book to any academic researcher in the HCI area, and any design professional that is currently using or trying to use personas in their organization. This is the book that will further legitimize and popularize the use of personas.

putting the user first
I recently worked on a project with one of the authors (Tamara Adlin) that utilized the Persona Lifecycle spelled out this book. What an amazing process. The principles that Adlin and Pruitt have articulated in this process help bring user centered design methodologies front and center. This is especially useful in highly matrixed or cross functional organizations that have trouble working effectively togeher. You end up with one common vocabulary - around your users/customers - that help everyone in an organization stay focused on who they are designing/developing for. The process helps to diffuse the politics and eliminate mixed signals on strategy -- which is useful to people at all levels in an organization.