The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
John Pruitt & Tamara Adlin
John and I started researching personas by creating workshops for persona practitioners at the 2000 & 2001 UPA conferences. We were approached to write a book and, because we were suffering from temporary insanity, we said yes. Five years later, here it is. Our goal was to create a book with lots of stories from real practitioners and ideas to help people at every stage of persona creation and use. It's a big book, but it's meant for skimming. There's a great foreword by Alan Cooper, hundreds of 'stories from the field' written by persona practitioners, and the five invited chapters add interesting perspectives from Whitney Quesenberry, Jonathan Grudin, Holly Jamesen, and Robert Barlow-Busch.
The official 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 doesnt 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.
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Testimonials
- 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
- 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
Published Reviews
- By STC at: www.stcsig.org
- By HCI International at: www.hci-international.org
Sample Chapter
- Chapter 1: Introduction (Acrobat PDF 764kb)
By the way…
Now that you are on the 'detail' or 'information' page for the book, I've included a lot more information. I could have put all of this information on the main 'books and articles' page…but then all of the other things I've written would have been pushed way down the page. This is an example of progressive disclosure of details, which allows you to provide the big picture and invites customers to 'drill in' based on their interests.