Personas - User Focused Design

Contending that people view each other as individuals, not classifiable types in a segmented society, this volume explains a versatile concept of user-focused design, solidly backed by research, and helpful in IT product design as much as character-led movies.

People relate to other people, not to simplified types or segments. This is the concept that underpins this book. Personas, a user centered design methodology, covers topics from interaction design within IT, through to issues surrounding product design, communication, and marketing.

Project developers need to understand how users approach their products from the product's infancy, and regardless of what the product might be. Developers should be able to describe the user of the product via vivid depictions, as if they with their different attitudes, desires and habits were already using the product. In doing so they can more clearly formulate how to turn the product's potential into reality.

Based on 20 years' experience in solving problems for businesses and 15 years of research, currently at the IT University of Copenhagen, Lene Nielsen is Denmark's leading expert in the persona method. She has a PhD in personas and scenarios, and through her research and practical experiences has developed her own approach to the method 10 Steps to Personas. This second edition of Personas User Focused Design presents a step-by-step methodology of personas which will be of interest to developers of IT, communications solutions and innovative products. This book also includes three new chapters and considerable expansion on the material in the first edition.

Based on 20 years of research in Personas and written by the leading expert in this field Provides guidelines and templates to write personas and scenarios Contains numerous cases and material from industrial projects

Inhalt

Introduction - Stories About Users.- A Slice of the World.- Finding the Connections.- Persona Writing.- Personas in Use.- Making Your Personas Live.- Going Global - International Personas.- Automatic Persona Generation for Online Content Creators: Conceptual Rationale and a Research Agenda.- Benefits and Challenges of Personas.