Reviewing Personas and Scenarios

Sorry for the delay, I've been quite overwhelmed with life lately! Last time I posted, I received some feedback that I had perhaps not been clear enough with my wording, so I'll try to clarify exactly what I meant as well as add some new information I've found.

User Profiles are sets of user data, gathered through polling your users directly. This is the data you will be using in order to create your personas.

Personas are, shall we say, your "average" user- taking the ages, genders, and other relevant information about your users from your set of user profiles, your persona's attributes are decided through averaging. For instance, if your users are predominantly male, your persona should be, too. And if your users are typically middle aged, the age of your persona should be a number that reflects that fact. (If you don't have any research on your users, try and guess who your biggest userbase is going to be.)

Scenarios, or what engineering students might recognize more easily as use cases, are lists of steps your persona must do when trying to reach a particular goal. Writing out these steps might seem tedious, but

There are two reasons for which personas are created:

- In order to empathize with your users; by creating a persona with a name and face, you can put yourself in their shoes much more easily than by simply addressing a user. Naming personas is mostly only necessary when you anticipate a need for several personae, but it also makes them seem more human- and the more human they are, the more easily you will be able to empathize with them.

-To be used in Scenarios. This is important because you need to be able to imagine yourself as someone else as they explore your design.

Here are some examples that I've created for the website I'm creating for myself-

Jessica Daly is a 28 year old recruiter who spends her time looking at the portfolios of recent college graduates and tries to place them in jobs that suit them. She is an experienced web designer as well, and navigates the internet with ease.

Scenario: Looking at Portfolios
Jessica has been directed to Elle's personal website through a business card, and is interested in looking at the most recent work in her portfolio.
1. Jessica loads up Elle's website and sees simple navigation on the side as well as a navigation bar at the top. She clicks on the link that says "Portfolio".
2. A new page, similar to the first but with images for content, appears. There are several thumbnails arranged clearly by year, and the most recent images are placed at the top. Jessica clicks the first thumbnail from the left.
3. The thumbnail expands to show a larger resolution image of the thumbnail. Now intending to exit, Jessica clicks the X at the top right hand corner of the image's border and closes the expanded image.

Simple, right? But I've gotten a lot of the rough facts laid down by working through it this way. By working it out like this, I now know how I want to have my portfolio page laid out, without even drawing it- and I also know that since my target audience is mostly recruiters, I should probably have my portfolio as one of the first links on my page.