Persona (user experience)

[3] They are captured in short page descriptions that include behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.

In this book, Cooper outlines the general characteristics, uses and best practices for creating personas, recommending that software be designed for single archetypal users.

[6] The concept of understanding customer segments as communities with coherent identity was developed in 1993-4 by Angus Jenkinson[7][8] and internationally adopted by OgilvyOne with clients using the name CustomerPrints as "day-in-the-life archetype descriptions".

Jenkinson's approach was to describe an imaginal character in their real interface, behavior and attitudes with the brand, and the idea was initially realized with Michael Jacobs in a series of studies.

This universe typically divides into a number of different communities within which there are the same or very similar buying behaviours, and whose personality and characteristics towards the brand (product or service) can be understood in terms of common values, attitudes and assumptions.

The first is designing for what Cooper calls "The Elastic User", by which he means that while making product decisions different stakeholders may define the 'user' according to their convenience.

Common features include: Criticism of personas falls into three general categories: analysis of the underlying logic, concerns about practical implementation, and empirical results.

[15] They argued that there is no procedure to work reliably from given data to specific personas, and thus such a process is not subject to the scientific method of reproducible research.

Other critics argue that personas can be reductive or stereotypic, leading to a false sense of confidence in an organization's knowledge about its users.

Critics like Steve Portigal argue that personas' "appeal comes from the seduction of a sanitized form of reality," where customer data is continuously reduced and abstracted until it is nothing more than a stereotype.

[16] Critics claim that persona creation puts the onus on designers, marketers, and user researchers to capture multiple peoples' opinions and views into predefined segments, which could introduce personal bias into the interpretation.

[18] Chapman, Love, Milham, Elrif, and Alford have demonstrated with survey data that descriptions with more than a few attributes (e.g., such as a persona) are likely to describe very few if any real people.