Microsoft's Persona Machine
by Mike OrenDownload: Audio Podcast
Mike Kuniavsky's Observing the User Experience [1] delves into the idea of user profiles as first introduced by usability guru Alan Cooper [2]. Both Cooper and Kuniavsky describe personas as a method to aid design and development as well as providing a common ground for communication between the various stakeholders within the company. Kuniavsky also alludes to the idea that the personas serve as a way to bring a sense of humanity to otherwise faceless statistics.
Microsoft Research has their own perspective [3] on personas. The referenced paper mentions some potential improvements to the personas outlined by Cooper and Kuniavsky, such as backing up the personas with real data in order to avoid making fictional creations based on stereotypes or biases. It is also suggested that using local residents that look like the personas instead of stock photos as a way to make the personas more human and less sterile. This is a tip that may not be practical for all companies but definitely has potential benefits. The paper also serves as an interesting examination of the trouble that a large company might have in integrating personas into the design and development process.
However, there are other portions of this paper that go against the idea of what personas are supposed to represent and as such defeats the purpose of using personas. For example, the creation of "speadsheet and document templates" is promoted as enabling more consistent and clear uses of the personas. Unfortunately, it also leads to a dehumanizing of the personas and pushes them toward statistical representations. Their method seems to make personas much more sterile and systematic. The dehumanizing only seems to worsen with the description of how these personas are used:
[...] feature-Persona weighted priority matrix that can help prioritize features for a product development cycle. In the example, the scoring in the feature rows is as follows: -1 (the Persona is confused, annoyed, or in some way harmed by the feature), 0 (the Persona doesni't care about the feature one way or the other), +1 (the feature provides some value to the Persona), +2 (the Persona loves this feature or the feature does something wonderful for the Persona even if they don't realize it). The sums are weighted according to the proportion of the market each represents.
While there's no denying that one of the primary purposes of using personas is to ensure that the products are designed with the users of the primary market in mind, the Microsoft approach seems to take persona towards design around a market demographic rather than design around a "single user". It takes the face of the persona and turns it to a set of faceless numbers. In fact, throughout Microsoft's discussion of personas, their central focus seems to be on data. As if personas and scenarios should be based only in data. For Microsoft, personas appear to be just slightly more than a glorified data collection adn analysis tool. Their approach runs against Cooper's empathetic vision of personas. Microsoft personas are the cold, sterile faces that appear to be created by engineers and marketing researchers. Microsoft's approach allows the inmates to continue to run the asylum.
Taking Back Control
While personas are meant to aid in ensuring that software is designed with users of the key markets in mind, they are also meant to provide a way for stakeholders within the company to connect with the users rather than just viewing them as a number or an item on a checklist. It's important to remember that when integrating personas into your company culture that you maintain their perceived humanity and avoid simply using them as a means of data collection. By maintaining the humanity of the persona you maintain the humanity of the user, help take control back from the inmates, and ultimately help fight for the cause of the user.
References
[1] Kuniavsky, M. "Observing the user experience: A practitioner's guide to user research." San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 2003[2] Alan Cooper Biography on Wikipedia
[3] Microsoft Research Personas