Personas and Scenarios: From Hypothetical Situations to Reality

Before you begin designing your website, it is important to have some method of anticipating your user's needs. But who are your users? How will they interact with your website? Asking yourself these questions helps, but in order to ask more concrete questions, creating personas becomes a necessity.

A persona is a character that has all of the traits of an actual person, except these traits are chosen in order to reflect the website they have been designed for.

Essential traits include:

• Name
•  Age
• Gender

Don't forget to find a picture to represent your persona! Personas should be as representative of real life as possible, and having a photograph to tie to each persona's details helps make the persona seem more like a real person.

Personas can also be used as the main characters in scenario writing, a commonly employed usability tool. Scenarios are written examples of your persona's attempts to fulfill their goals through your website, and are created in order to lay out each interaction. Doing so allows you to plan out your website in great detail, and also allows you to immerse yourself more deeply into your persona's character.

To summarize:

• Personas should be detailed fictional characters who share traits with your users.
• Scenarios should be created around each persona's interaction with your website (whether you have created a design for it yet or not)

In my next post, I will detail some of the features your users have that are important to address in persona creation.