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=**DESIGN Mini-Assignment: Persona**= Created by Mie Buskirk ELT 641.20 F11 Learning Designs-Analyze Problems & Tools Date: 12/15/11

In most cases, designers do not have opportunities to talk directly to users to find out what they expect for products or services. Persona design is to create an idea of a user type, which generally called imaginary friends. Persona design sometimes closely works with scenario design. Developing a persona moving through a scenario helps the design team bridge the contexts of development and use. By applying a scenario, designers can learn patterns of user’s behavior in the context of social setting.

Persona design can fail. One of the examples is that designers assume default personas. Reverse engineering is default personas. It is to take the final product and break down the product in reverse order to trace the development path. Designers take some processes out of this path and apply for their new product. Reverse engineering does not take user’s expectation into the consideration. Another example of failures is to create personas based on designer’s preferred beliefs and imagination. These are designer’s subjective view of users and such persona may not provide the real user’s expectation.

Criticism against persona design is that personas are fictional, not based on a real user’s data. Persona design is not scientific because statistical data is not collected from real users. Some researchers argue that persona design keeps designers away from real users and their needs.

The important factor of persona design is to make sure solutions go to where the user problems are. To successfully apply persona design, the design team collects compelling user’s stories in social context, keeps the story as a part of the design collaboration, and views the product features as user-centered design. One college students’ comparative studies showed positive results. The study showed that students using persona produced designs with better usability attributes than the students who did not use persona. The study also suggested that using personas can improve communication between design teams and facilitate more constructive and user-focused design discussion.

References: __[]__ __[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(marketing)]__ __[]__