In the past two posts I did some pretty detailed persona development for user types on Twitter.
You may have asked yourself:
Why did she go into so much detail?
I wanted to explain persona development and needed it to be presentable for the post I’ve written and I will refer to them in future posts.
My philosophy
I believe that you should only do the level of documentation appropriate to the project requirements and budget.
Persona development in the real world:
- I do persona development for any large website project I’ve ever planned out. I think it’s good practice for finding possible gaps in the functionality.
- Generally it takes 10 to 15 minutes with the most important aspects of the user type jotted on pieces of paper.
- Anything of importance that I learn is included in my functional specification or information architecture documents.
- I pay special attention to internal business stakeholders who use functionality every day i.e. website managers working on bespoke CMS back-ends.
- I’ve often done persona development (maybe scenario building is a better term in this context) when I sit with development, design and/or business stakeholders and we’re trying to figure functionality out, change functionality or improve functionality.
- It’s important to include persona development when you pitch for projects.
In the next post I will use my Twitter personas to define social media strategies.