The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design

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.

CONTENTS:

Chapter 1 - The Next Frontier for User-Centered Design: Making User Representations More Usable
Chapter 2 - The Persona Lifecycle: A framework for the persona approach
Chapter 3 - Phase 1: Family Planning (planning a persona effort)
Chapter 4 - Phase 2: Conception & Gestation (creating personas)
Chapter 5 - Phase 3: Birth & Maturation (launching and communicating personas)
Chapter 6 - Phase 4: Adulthood (using personas)
Chapter 7 - Phase 5: Lifetime Achievement and Retirement (ROI and reuse of personas)

Contributed Chapters:
Chapter 8 - Users, roles and personas (by Larry Constantine)
Chapter 9 - Storytelling and narrative (by Whitney Quesenbery)
Chapter 10 - Reality and Design Maps (by Tamara Adlin & Holly Jamesen)
Chapter 11 - Marketing versus design personas (by Bob Barlow-Busch)
Chapter 12 - Why personas work: The psychological evidence (by Jonathan Grudin)
Appendix A- Example Personas
Appendix B- Sample Image Release Form
References
Contributor Index
Index