The Essential Persona Lifecycle
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The Essential
Persona Lifecycle
Your Guide to Building and
Using Personas
Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt


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10 11 12 13 14 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to the hundreds of brave souls who have participated in our
workshops and worked with us as clients or colleagues over the past 10 years. Your creativity
and experiences helped us build this process, and we couldn’t have done it without you.
Oh, and we both adore our families and friends. Your support
(and patience) mean the world to us.
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vii
CONTENTS
About the Authors ix
CHAPTER 1 What are personas? 1
Introduction 1

Why a persona lifecycle? 1
Why another persona lifecycle book? 4
What additional materials will I fi nd in the original persona lifecycle book? 4
CHAPTER 2 The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle 7
Introduction 7
The persona lifecycle encourages and supports user-centered design 8
CHAPTER 3 Persona family planning 11
What is family planning for personas? 11
Organizational introspection: Are personas right for your project? 11
Step 1. Build a core team 12
Step 2. Identify goals 12
Step 3. Create an action plan 14
Step 4. Get your hands on some data 14
Get ready for conception and gestation! 17
CHAPTER 4 Persona conception and gestation 19
What is the conception and gestation process for personas? 20
The six-step conception and gestation process 21
How long does the conception and gestation process take? 23
How many personas should you create? 23
Persona conception: Steps 1, 2, and 3 25
Persona gestation: Steps 4, 5, and 6 51
How to know you are ready for birth and maturation 79
Summary 80
CHAPTER 5 Persona birth and maturation 81
What is birth and maturation for personas? 82
Step 1. Prepare for birth and beyond 82
Step 2. Birth 88
Step 3. Maturation 93
Persona artifacts (the what and how of communicating your
personas) 95

If you are a consultant 112
Summary 113
CHAPTER 6 Persona adulthood 115
What is adulthood for personas? 116
What to expect during persona adulthood 116
Job 1: Help your personas settle in 117
Start with the basics: Invite personas into your offi ces and into your
meetings 118
Plan, design, evaluate, release: How to use personas during the
stages of product development 119
CONTENTS

viii
Stage 1. Use personas to plan your product 120
Stage 2. Use personas to explore design solutions 130
Use personas to help you explore visual design solutions 148
Adult personas and developers 150
Stage 3. Use personas to evaluate your solutions 151
Stage 4. Use personas to support the release of your product 157
Transitioning into lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement 160
Summary 161
CHAPTER 7 Persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement 163
What are lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement for personas? 163
Step 1. Measure the return on investment of your persona effort 164
Step 2. Decide how to manage the transition to the next project 165
Summary 168
APPENDIX A Ad hoc persona example 171
Company: ACME professional association for CPAs 171
Gary getting started 171
Meet gary 171

APPENDIX B Data-driven persona example 173
Description 173
Tanner’s goals and desires 175
What does Tanner want from G4kids.com? 176
Tanner’s computer and internet usage 176
Research report references 180
APPENDIX C Case study: G4K (games 4 kids) kids’ web portal 183
Introduction 184
G4K persona family planning 184
The G4K persona team fi nd some much needed data free
web-based data sources 186
G4K persona conception and gestation 189
Identifying factoids and transferring them to sticky notes 191
Assimiliating factoids 192
Identifying subcategories of users and creating skeletons 194
Discussing priorities 195
Completing the personas 197
G4K persona birth and maturation 199
G4K persona adulthood 201
Using personas for competitive analysis 201
Using personas for feature brainstorms 205
Creating a persona-weighted feature matrix 206
Using a scenario collection spreadsheet 206
G4K measures the ROI of the persona effort 210
Measuring product improvements 211
Measuring process improvements 212
Preparing personas for the next project 213
Bibliography 215
Index 217
ix

Tamara Adlin is the president of adlin, inc., a user experience strategy company in Seattle,
Washington. Tamara’s focus is on … focus! She’s an expert at wrangling executive teams until
they agree on a shared, crystal-clear, and prioritized set of key users and their goals; she
believes that teams who can develop and stick with a solid focus on their users are in the
best position to create really great products. She has tons of fun running workshops with
executives, and then diving in to help teams who are working ‘ in the trenches ’ to design and
develop great products. Tamara co-authored The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind
Throughout Product Design with John Pruitt, has been featured in several other books, and has
been invited to speak on user experience strategy all over the world. In her recent work life,
Tamara co-founded Fell Swoop, a user experience design company, and she ran a customer
experience and usability team at Amazon.com. She cut her professional teeth at a series of
Seattle tech startups after getting her Master’s Degree in Technical Communication from
the University of Washington. Today, she’s happily focusing on practical methods that help
business people increase their bottom lines by focusing on their customers, and she’s got her
work cut out for her.
John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version
of SharePoint as part of the Microsoft Offi ce 2010 suite of products. Since joining Microsoft
in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows
(including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft’s integrated
Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the
Tablet PC and the super small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). Prior to Microsoft, he
was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced
Telecommunications Research Laboratory in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian
scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in
experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published a variety of
journal articles and book chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-
making, speech perception, and second-language learning. He has been creating and using
personas for more than 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring
numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John co-authored the
book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design , with Tamara

Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry
events.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
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1
CHAPTER
What are personas?
INTRODUCTION
Personas are fi ctitious, specifi c, concrete representations of target users. The notion of
personas was created by Alan Cooper and popularized in his book The Inmates Are Running
the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Sams
Publishing, 1999). Personas put a face on the user — a memorable, engaging, and actionable
image that serves as a design target. They convey information about users to your product
team in ways that other artifacts cannot.
Personas have many benefi ts:
● Personas make assumptions and knowledge about users explicit, creating a common
language with which to talk about users meaningfully.
● Personas allow you to focus on and design for a small set of specifi c users (who are not
necessarily like you), helping you make better decisions.
● Personas engender interest and empathy toward users, engaging your team in a way that
other representations of user data cannot.
In other words, personas will help you, your team, and your organization become more user
focused.
WHY A PERSONA LIFECYCLE?
We originally wrote The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
because lots of people were excited about personas, but:
● No one had described, in practical terms, how to create personas.
● No one had described specifi c tools for using personas during a product development
process.
● Practitioners who had tried personas had failed in their efforts more often than they had

succeeded.
1
Introduction 1
Why a Persona Lifecycle? 1
The Five Phases of the Persona Lifecycle 2
Why Another Persona Lifecycle Book? 4
What Additional Materials Will I
Find in the Original Persona
Lifecycle Book? 4
CHAPTER OUTLINE
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
2
We looked into why so many persona efforts were failing, and we found four common
reasons:

1. The effort was not accepted or supported by the leadership team.
2. The personas were not credible and not associated with methodological rigor and data.
3. The personas were poorly communicated.
4. The product design and development team employing personas did not understand how
to use them.
The Persona Lifecycle was a solution: an end-to-end set of methods and tools designed to
support persona practitioners from the moment they decided to try personas until well after
the completion of a project. The persona lifecycle is built on several core assertions, all of
which arose from our research and experience:
● Building personas from assumptions is good; building personas from data is much, much
better.
● Personas are not documents. They are shared ideas around who your users are that must
come to life in the minds of the people in your organization.
● Personas are a highly memorable, inherently usable communication tool if they are

communicated well.
● Personas can be initiated by executives or fi rst used as part of a bottom-up grass-roots
experiment, but eventually they require support at all levels of an organization.
● As long as personas are well built, data driven (or otherwise validated and agreed upon),
and thoughtfully communicated, the product team can use the personas that come to
exist to generate new insights and seek out the right details when they need them.
● Personas are not a stand-alone, user-centered design (UCD) process but should be
integrated into existing processes and used to augment existing tools.
● Effective persona efforts require organizational introspection and strategic thinking.
● Personas can be created and show their value quickly, but if you want to obtain the full
value from personas you will have to commit to a signifi cant investment of time and
resources.
We understand that the devil is in the details when it comes to launching a persona effort
within an organization, and we are excited to share specifi c techniques that will help you
succeed in your own persona efforts and in turn help your organization realize the benefi ts
of truly UCD.
The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle
The persona lifecycle is a metaphoric framework that breaks the persona process into phases
similar to those of human procreation and development. As shown in Figure 1.1 , the fi ve
phases in this framework bring structure to the potentially complicated process of persona
creation and highlight critical (yet often overlooked or ignored) aspects of persona use:
● Family planning — Before you begin any persona effort, you should fi gure out what
problems you’re trying to solve and what materials (specifi cally, data sources) are already
available for you to use.
● Conception and gestation — Organize assumptions; turn data into information and
information into personas.
● Birth and maturation — Create a persona campaign and introduce the personas to your
organization.
● Adulthood — Use the personas in specifi c ways to help during the design, development,
evaluation, and release of your product.

● Lifetime achievement and retirement — Measure the success of the persona effort and create a
plan to reuse or retire the personas.
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
3
As the name indicates, the persona lifecycle is a cyclical, largely serial, process model. As
Figure 1.1 shows, each stage builds on the next, culminating but not ending at the adulthood
phase. Note also that the fi nal stage, lifetime achievement and retirement , is not immediately
followed by a cyclical return to the fi rst stage. This is because different persona efforts
culminate and restart in different ways. Personas can be reused, reincarnated, or retired
depending on the project.
More importantly, although each phase does build on the previous, some are more
important than others, and some you can complete in just an hour or two if need be.
Conception and gestation and adulthood are the vital steps. As you read this book, remember
that you can (and should) customize your own persona process in accordance with the
amount of time, resources, and data you have.
The persona lifecycle doesn’t have to take a long time. You can, and should, be selective in
the techniques you choose to integrate into your persona effort. Although we do not think
it is a good idea to skip any of the lifecycle phases completely, we do believe it is completely
acceptable to take some shortcuts within any of the phases. Giving some attention to every
phase will increase the odds that your persona effort will ultimately be successful. Your
overall goal should be to create helpful and well-used personas, not to follow the process
described in this book to the letter. Throughout the book, we suggest both complete end-to-
end processes and helpful shortcuts. We point out the processes we believe to be the most
important and effective, and you can treat each chapter as a menu of techniques and tools
that can be used together or independently.
Family Planning
Conception & Gestation
Birth & Maturation
Adulthood

Lifetime
Achievment
& Retirement
FIGURE 1.1
The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle. This diagram is designed to show both the order of the phases (from
family planning through conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and fi nally lifetime achievement
and retirement) and the relative amount of effort and importance related to each phase. Each lifecycle phase is
covered in detail in subsequent chapters of this book.
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?
4
WHY ANOTHER PERSONA LIFECYCLE BOOK?
The original version of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design
is rich in details, examples, philosophy, and stories from the fi eld. It was written to give
you the full context around every aspect of persona creation, communication, and use, in
addition to as many tools and tricks as we could fi nd. The original is a reference tome that
will help practitioners navigate the specifi c needs of their own organizations … and get past
the inevitable hurdles everyone faces during a persona effort.
This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is
completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the
particular tool or method is the right one. For that reason, we have signifi cantly shortened
the entire book, and we have further abridged the chapters that did not include critical steps
in the persona creation and use process.
We have focused the content as follows:
● Family planning — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you get organized
● Conception and gestation — Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to
completed personas
● Birth and maturation — Strategic techniques to get the right information about your
personas out to your teammates at the right time
● Adulthood — Specifi c tools that will ensure your personas are used by the right people at

the right times (and in the right ways!) during the product development cycle
● Lifetime achievement and retirement — Basic ideas and a few tools that will help you
measure the success of your persona effort … and prepare for the next one
Again , we don’t recommend that you skip any step in the persona lifecycle (even those that
we cover very briefl y here). In this book, we include some guidelines that will help you with
every phase, no matter how much time you have. Our goal is to help you give some thought
to important issues and jot down some basic information. A little upfront work will be
incredibly helpful when you need to justify your project, capture lessons learned, and plan
for your next persona effort.
WHAT ADDITIONAL MATERIALS WILL I FIND IN THE
ORIGINAL PERSONA LIFECYCLE BOOK?
Our original book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design , is a
lot longer than this edition, which provides a very practical — in some cases, a step-by-step —
description of the basics of the persona lifecycle; the original includes much more in-depth
content. Several chapters in this edition, including those on family planning and retirement
and lifetime achievement, have been radically shortened; they tell you what you need to
do but do not include details on how to do some of these steps. The chapter on birth and
maturation is shortened, but not as drastically; it still contains some specifi c how-to methods
and suggestions. The chapters on conception and gestation and adulthood are also still quite
detailed, and they include a few important updates based on lessons we’ve learned since our
original book was published.
Having said that, one of our most important insights into persona projects is that the
devil is always in the details. If you fi nd yourself stuck during the process, don’t despair.
Instead, consult the original persona lifecycle book for many more details and suggestions,
including:
● A complete history of the origin of personas
● Detailed analysis of why personas work and what causes them to fail
● Many “ bright ideas ” to help streamline your persona efforts
CHAPTER 1
What are personas?

5
● Dozens of stories from the fi eld written by other persona practitioners that will give you
fi rst hand insights based on their experiences and ideas for new methods and tools that
have worked for them

● An extensive case study based on our fi ctitious company, G4K, which provides examples
of all the materials related to a successful persona effort
In addition, the original book includes fi ve invited chapters written by persona experts:
● “ Users, Roles, and Personas, ” by Larry Constantine
● “ Storytelling and Narrative, ” by Whitney Quesenberry
● “ Reality and Design Maps, ” by Tamara Adlin and Holly Jamesen
● “ Marketing Versus Design Personas, ” by Bob Barlow-Busch
● “ Why Personas Work: The Psychological Evidence, ” by Jonathan Grudin
But don’t worry: we’ve made sure to provide you with all the basics you’ll need as you
embark on your persona effort right here in this book.
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7
CHAPTER
The fi ve phases of the
persona lifecycle
INTRODUCTION
The persona lifecycle is a metaphoric framework that breaks the persona process into phases
similar to those of human procreation and development. As shown in Figure 2.1 , the fi ve
phases in this framework bring structure to the potentially complicated process of persona
creation and highlight critical (yet often overlooked or ignored) aspects of persona use:
● Family planning — Before you begin any persona effort, you should fi gure out what
problems you’re trying to solve and what materials (specifi cally, data sources) are already
available for you to use.
● Conception and gestation — Organize assumptions; turn data into information and
information into personas.

● Birth and maturation — Create a persona campaign and introduce the personas to your
organization.
● Adulthood — Use the personas in specifi c ways to help during the design, development,
evaluation, and release of your product.
● Lifetime achievement and retirement — Measure the success of the persona effort and create a
plan to reuse or retire the personas.
As the name indicates, the persona lifecycle is a cyclical, largely serial, process model. As
Figure 2.1 shows, each stage builds on the next, culminating but not ending at the adulthood
phase. Note also that the fi nal stage, lifetime achievement and retirement , is not immediately
followed by a cyclical return to the fi rst stage. This is because different persona efforts
culminate and restart in different ways. Personas can be reused, reincarnated, or retired
depending on the project.
More importantly, although each phase does build on the previous, some are more
important than others, and some you can complete in just an hour or two if need be.
2
Introduction 7
The Persona Lifecycle Encourages and
Supports User-Centered Design 8
Phase 1. Persona Family Planning 8
Phase 2. Persona Conception and
Gestation 9
Phase 3. Persona Birth and Maturation 9
Phase 4. Persona Adulthood 10
Phase 5. Persona Lifetime Achievement,
Reuse, and Retirement 10
CHAPTER OUTLINE
CHAPTER 2
The five phases of the persona lifecycle
8
Conception and gestation and adulthood are the vital steps. As you read this book, remember

that you can (and should) customize your own persona process in accordance with the
amount of time, resources, and data you have.
THE PERSONA LIFECYCLE ENCOURAGES AND
SUPPORTS USER-CENTERED DESIGN
The persona lifecycle will work for you whether or not you have already incorporated user-
centered design (UCD) methods into your product development cycle. The persona lifecycle
does not replace existing processes; rather, the phases of the lifecycle help to structure user-
centered thinking throughout whatever design and development process you have in place.
In this section, we illustrate the ways the phases of the persona lifecycle will introduce UCD
into your organization (if UCD methods have not yet been adopted) or enhance UCD
methods already in practice.
Phase 1. Persona family planning
Persona development begins with family planning. This is the research and analysis phase
that precedes the actual creation of personas. During family planning, you will focus on:

● Creating a core team of colleagues to help you with the entire persona effort
● Researching your own organization (which we call organizational introspection ) to
evaluate the problems and needs of your company, organization, or product — once you
understand the needs you hope the persona effort will address, you can evangelize the
persona method and prepare the product development team for the persona effort
Family Planning
Conception & Gestation
Birth & Maturation
Adulthood
Lifetime
Achievment
& Retirement
FIGURE 2.1
The fi ve phases of the persona lifecycle. This diagram is designed to show both the order of the phases (from
family planning through conception and gestation, birth and maturation, adulthood, and fi nally lifetime achievement

and retirement) and the relative amount of effort and importance related to each phase. Each lifecycle phase is
covered in detail in subsequent chapters of this book.
CHAPTER 2
The five phases of the persona lifecycle
9
● User research and identifi cation of data sources that will provide the raw materials for
your personas

● Thinking strategically about how you will introduce and support the personas in your
organization
Family planning ends when:
● You have established that personas are right for your organization and current project.
● You have buy-in from key individuals and have completed initial research and data
gathering.
● The persona core team is in place.
● You have created a solid plan for the rest of the persona effort that suits your product
team’s needs.
Phase 2. Persona conception and gestation
In the chapter on persona conception and gestation, we explain how to extract useful
information from disparate data sources and use this information to build personas. We
have included some new suggestions, process descriptions, and insights in this edition of our
book; these refl ect the evolution of our process since the publication of The Persona Lifecycle:
Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design.
During the persona conception and gestation phase, the lifecycle process helps you decide:
● How many personas you will need to create to communicate the key information in your
data
● Which qualities and descriptive elements you should include in your persona documents
and how to tie these elements back to your original data sources
● How to prioritize and validate your personas
● How to decide when your personas are complete and ready to be introduced to your

product team
A lot of the work during the conception and gestation phase centers on collaboratively
fi ltering data and organizing information — information that arises out of the data you
collect in family planning and information that arises from other sources, such as inherent
knowledge of how people behave, your business or product strategy, the competitive
marketplace, and technological affordances related to your product domain. The information
you identify will help you understand the particular user roles, user goals, and user segments
that uniquely describe your target users. When you have isolated information about your
users ’ roles, goals, and segments, you will be able to determine what personas you should
create to capture and communicate the most relevant qualities of (and differences among)
target users related to your product domain and business strategy.
When you have completed the process described in the chapter on conception and gestation,
you will have translated raw data and insights into a set of complete, robust personas that are
ready to participate in the product design process.
Phase 3. Persona birth and maturation
Like parents sending young children off to school, you and your core team will send your
personas into your organization to interact with other people. The personas are fully formed
but may continue to evolve slightly over time. Moreover, throughout the remainder of the
development cycle, your personas will continue to develop in the minds of your product
team. Problems at this phase might involve a lack of acceptance or visibility and other
problems that lead to personas that die on the vine and disappear from the project. More
subtly, your personas may come to be misconstrued and misinterpreted. Successful persona
birth and maturation require a strong, clear focus on communication to ensure that your
CHAPTER 2
The five phases of the persona lifecycle
10
personas are not just known and understood but also adopted, remembered, and used by
the product team. The chapter on birth and maturation includes:

● Creating a persona campaign plan to organize your work in birth and maturation and

adulthood
● Introducing the personas (and the persona method) to the product team
● Ensuring that the personas are understood, revered, and likely to be used (for example,
creating artifacts to progressively disclose persona details)
● Managing the minor changes to the persona descriptions that become necessary after the
personas are introduced
We help you decide which of many artifacts to create and when and how to use them to keep
the personas (and the data they contain) fresh in the minds of the product team. We also
give you pointers on maintaining the delicate balance of sharing ownership of the personas
(and the details they contain) while ensuring that new or altered details don’t threaten the
integrity of the underlying data.
Phase 4. Persona adulthood
Personas are all grown up in the adulthood phase, and have a job to do. You have introduced
the personas to the product team and have worked to clarify the role and importance of
the personas. You have encouraged the product team to embrace the personas and the
information they contain, and now it is time to help everyone use the personas to inform the
design and development of the product.
The effective persona practitioner must understand the many ways personas can be involved
in existing processes and ensure that the personas work hard in an organization during the
core development phases.
Personas can be used to help you plan, design, evaluate, and release your products. Personas
can also inform marketing, advertising, and sales strategy. The chapter on adulthood is full of
practical tools and suggestions to ensure that your personas have real impact — that they get
used in a meaningful way by your product team.
Phase 5. Persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement
Once the project or product is completed, it is time to think about what has been
accomplished and to prepare for the next project. You will want to assess how effective the
persona method was for your team and product development process. If you are beginning
to think about the next product (or next version of the product just released), you will need
to decide whether and how you will reuse your existing personas and the information they

contain.
The end of a product design and development cycle is a good time to assess the effectiveness
of personas for the team and to take stock of lessons learned for the next time. How did the
development team accept the method? Were your personas useful? To what extent were they
accurate and precise? We provide suggestions and tools you can use to validate the use of
personas in the development process and to determine if the persona effort was worth the
exertion and resources it required. Did personas change the product? Did they change your
design and development process? User-centered designers are constantly under pressure to
validate the worth and return on investment (ROI) of their activities, and personas can be
useful tools for measuring the success of both the product and of the UCD (user-centered
design) activities as a whole.
11
CHAPTER
Persona family planning
WHAT IS FAMILY PLANNING FOR PERSONAS?
Family planning is the fi rst phase in your persona process. It is the time when you will do
some investigation and strategic thinking about your organization and its approach to user-
centered design (UCD) and development. Your personas will not be introduced to the rest
of your organization until the birth and maturation phase, but the ultimate success you have
with them depends a lot on the work you do during the family planning phase. It is critical
that you use this time to think up front about what happens after the personas are created.
There are four major activities during the family planning phase:
● Building a core team
● Researching your own organization (organizational introspection)
● Creating an action plan
● Collecting data
In this version of our book, we introduce the basic steps you should complete during the
family planning phase. As you’ll see, much of family planning is about thinking, planning,
assessing, and gathering materials. For more detailed suggestions related to family planning,
see the related chapter in The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind During Product Design.

ORGANIZATIONAL INTROSPECTION: ARE PERSONAS
RIGHT FOR YOUR PROJECT?
Your fi rst job is to take a realistic look at the problems your team and organization are
trying to solve and decide if personas will help. Don’t skip this step to save time, even if
your team needed personas a month ago. We defi ne organizational introspection as the process
3
What Is Family Planning for
Personas? 11
Organizational Introspection: Are
Personas Right for Your Project? 11
Step 1. Build a Core Team 12
Step 2. Identify Goals 12
Creating Clear Goals Now Will Help You
Measure ROI Later 13
Step 3. Create an Action Plan 14
Step 4. Get Your Hands on Some
Data 14
Stay Organized 16
Get Ready for Conception and
Gestation! 17
CHAPTER OUTLINE
CHAPTER 3
Persona family planning
12
of evaluating the problems and needs of your company, organization, and product team.
Organizational introspection is, in simple terms, working to answer the following questions:

● How user focused is your company?
● How do people think and communicate about users?
● How is user information incorporated into the product design and development

process?
Do a thorough job in examining the personalities and politics that surround you. Only then
can you decide if personas are the right way to address the problems facing your organization
and product team and, if so, how you should introduce and maintain the personas to ensure
maximum acceptance. If you conclude that personas are appropriate for your team, process,
and product needs, you will then be ready to assemble a team, create a plan to ensure that
your personas will be used and found helpful, and begin collecting data.
STEP 1. BUILD A CORE TEAM
Even if your team is just you and one other person, the discussions you will have will provide
you with a critical perspective on your work and on the decisions you are making that you
simply cannot arrive at by yourself. You need a persona core team because:
● Personas can be a lot of work for just one person.
● Discussion and debate are critical activities in the persona creation process.
● Getting your personas accepted and used requires cross-organizational buy-in.
In most cases, we have found that effective persona core teams include a minimum of two
and a maximum of ten members. In our experience, teams with over ten members require
too much coordination and quickly become unmanageable. The ideal persona core team has
three to fi ve active members and several other members in an advisory or on-call role.
Plan to include the people who are already involved in user research, market research,
business analysis, task analysis, or any other user- or customer-focused research or profi ling
activity. If you have colleagues in any of the following specialties, you should put them on
the short list for inclusion on the core team:
● Information architects, interaction designers, and human – computer interaction (HCI)
specialists
● Usability specialists, user researchers, and ethnographers
● Technical writers, documentation specialists, and training specialists
● Market researchers, business analysts, and product managers
STEP 2. IDENTIFY GOALS
One of your jobs, as a user-centered designer, is to help build focus in your organization.
Personas will help you to do this, but they aren’t the only tool at your disposal. Before you

dive head-fi rst into creating personas, you should do everything you can to articulate (and
get sign-off on!) a very specifi c set of goals. These goals will help you keep your executive
team on track during the adulthood phase of the lifecycle, and they will help you measure
the success of the project.
We recommend this (deceptively simple) set of questions:
1. What are the top three to fi ve business goals for your product or service? Business goals
are expressed in numbers. They describe the needles that this project should help to
move. A statement such as “ increase revenue and decrease costs ” isn’t specifi c enough
CHAPTER 3
Persona family planning
13
to be a useful goal. Instead, ask for extremely specifi c numbers — for example, “ increase
number of purchases on our website by 20% ” or “ decrease number of customer service
calls related to returns by 50%. ”

2. What are the top three to fi ve brand goals for your product or service? Brand goals are
expressed in terms of the way you want the new product or service to articulate, advance,
or modify the perception of your brand.
3. What are the top three to fi ve user experience goals for your product or service? Customer
experience goals express the problems you want your site to solve for your customers. Try
writing these as quotes you would like to hear coming out of your users ’ mouths after
they see your new product or service — for example, “ Wow, I didn’t know that I could fi nd
information about all of my accounts in one place! ”
4. What are the most important differentiators for your product or service? What are you
offering your customers that no one else can? Remember, these really need to be different.
It’s not enough to say, “ We have the best customer service in the industry. ” That’s too
vague, and it’s not really defensible.
5. What are the most important value propositions for your product or service? Why should
your customers care about your differentiators?
You ’d think that any business would have a list of all of these available to anyone who

asks. Maybe your company is different, but we have never encountered any company that
could just hand over the answers to these questions on request. Remember to approach
this carefully. Your role is not to challenge the executive team or accuse them of being
disorganized. Instead, let them know that it’s your job to understand what these goals are and
to ensure that everyone working on the project is crystal clear on the most important goals
for the company.
We suggest you try to fi nd these types of goals in documents available to you or that you
draft what you think the goals are. Ask your boss, and your boss ’ s boss, to correct any
misunderstandings you have.
Creating clear goals now will help you measure ROI later
Measuring the ROI of the overall project is very important; it’s also important to measure the
ROI of the persona effort itself. Personas aren’t free. They cost time and effort and, in many
cases, at least a little bit of money. Doing a little thinking now can set you up very well to
measure the value of the personas to the overall project once everything is said and done.
There are several ways your personas can help, and each of these can be measured:
● Personas can help improve your process; for example, personas can help your teams
communicate more effectively, agree on and document design decisions, or achieve
resolution on key issues faster.
● Personas can help improve your products; for example, your products can (and should!)
suffer from fewer bugs and require less support and user-facing documentation.
● Personas can help improve your organization; for example, personas can ease political
disputes, improve internal communication between departments and from the executive
teams, and even noticeably increase the overall customer focus of the entire company.
You ’ll see that the ways to measure change aren’t necessarily numeric (in fact, they are seldom
numeric). But, you’ll fi nd that it certainly is possible to think about the way things are today,
how we want things to be, and what things will have to change in order to make that dream
come true. Not all measures of ROI have to be expressed in numbers. See Table 3.1 for a
sample Persona Effort Goals Worksheet.
CHAPTER 3
Persona family planning

14
STEP 3. CREATE AN ACTION PLAN
The action plan is a translation of all of the analysis you have done into a roadmap or
specifi cation for your persona effort. Although they can be of different formats, all persona
action plans incorporate the following:
● A defi nition of the scope of the project and the associated goals for the persona core team
● A description of a communication strategy
● A listing of milestones and deliverables
If you know you will need to explain the value of your persona-related work at the end of
your project, create your action plan to explicitly answer the questions on the left-hand side
of the table shown in Figure 3.1 . Figure 3.2 shows a generic action plan and how to detail
milestones and deliverables.
Note that you will be able to use your action plan to assess the value of your persona effort
during the lifetime achievement and retirement phase by measuring the changes that result
from your work.
STEP 4. GET YOUR HANDS ON SOME DATA
During the family planning phase, your goal is to fi gure out what your data sources should
be and to collect the raw data. We believe that the best personas come from a variety of
FIGURE 3.1
Measuring the return on your persona-effort investment is much easier if your plan includes specifi c references to
the improvements you hope to realize. If you create your action plan to explicitly cover the questions on the left-
hand side of the table shown here, you will thank yourself during the lifetime achievement and retirement phase.
TABLE 3.1 Persona Effort Goals Worksheet
Goal or issue How things are
today
How we want things
to be tomorrow
Ways to measure change
Use personas to
create a clear,

shared focus
across the entire
organization.
(Or state another
process,
product, or
organizational
improvement
goal or issue.)
We’re just getting
started, so we’re
still driving to
clarity on exactly
who our target
users are and the
relative business
value of each.
We want a set
of personas that
everyone knows and
business goals for
each release or project
articulated in terms of
personas ’ needs.
After the fi rst release, ask
everyone to describe the
three most important users.
Collect current business and
vision documents — note the
ways users are referenced.

After the persona effort, all
documents should reference
the personas. (Before
beginning this process, we
should have asked everyone
to describe the three most
important users of the
product or service.)