Persona

Full Title or Meme

• A Digital Identity with a Digital Identifier (name), Attributes, behaviors and history:

1. In User Experience a construct used to create a user journey.
2. In Identity Management one of a set of Identities created by a real person corresponding to different roles that they wish to expose to the web.

Context

There are two contexts corresponding to the two uses listed above:

1. During the development of a digital product a designer will try to imagine the different Personas that will be using in product both to help design the product and then to test the product.
2. Users naturally have several personas on the web corresponding to email names and the community of users that share that email server. For example, Harry S Truman claimed that there were two Personas sitting at the Resolute desk, him as a human being and the president of the United States.

Problems

• Designers have a hard time imagining any uses for product that are not related to their own usage patterns. The result is products that are found to be difficult for their users to understand.
• People can have different personas, like racing cars for a living and coaching little league as a father.

Solutions

1. During the build up to Windows Vista several personas were used to test the UX to see if it worked for different uses, but there was no plan for blending more that one for a single user.
2. A proposal called "Circles" was proposed for Windows 7 by Tom Jones, that recognized the difference personas that one person plays in their life, but it was inconsistent with the push for ribbons that Steve Sinofsky brought in with his team from Office.
3. https://theblog.adobe.com/putting-personas-to-work-in-ux-design-what-they-are-and-why-theyre-important/
4. Octopus shows multiple personas on their identity app.