Personas

Trish is 35 years old. She's been working at the company for 10 years now as an office administrator. In the morning, after she gets her coffee, she would spend 15 minutes checking her e-mail inbox in MS Outlook. She would then open up her Outlook calendar to see if she has any meetings to attend for the day. Most of her daily work tasks are done in MS Word. She's quite confident in her Word abilities, but would consider herself as the last person to ask for help when it comes to troubleshooting Excel - what she considers as the least understandable piece of computer software ever made...

I've been taking a creative copy writing class after work, and found that good copy writing shares at least one common trait with good technical writing. That is, we all write, or should write, to a persona. Words don't exist or form in a vacuum; there is no all-encompassing method to explain how a jet engine works. Nor would we ask the actor to wear a chicken suit in a TV ad with the hope to sell more life insurance policies. Before a technical communicator sits down to design a manual or help system, there's always one thing worth asking - how are you fulfilling the needs of your users of the product or service your company is selling? Your writing could have lots of information, but if delivered incorrectly, your efforts will have turned out in vain.

If your organization doesn't have a lot of resources to allow for expensive surveys, or have customers come in to the office to complete usability tests - creating a persona may just be the ticket for you. The fact is, personas have already been in use in the design process for many of the products you use. Big software companies that focus on user-interface design, have long employed personas as part of the development process. There are many benefits. Here's an example of a few:

• They ensure that designers adopt the customer's mental model rather than their own, while avoiding second guessing of customer needs.
• They put a human face to customer data, and therefore allow a clearer visualization of how your customer is using the product.
• More than one persona can be used to represent the needs of a multitude of different users of your product.

When creating a persona, there are lots of information you can gather. What is this person's job experience level? What does their typical work day consist of? What do they like about their job? What do they hate? What are their career ambitions? What is their attitude towards technology? What is their name. What do they look like? The more convinced you are that this fictional character exists, the more effective the persona will be for your documentation and training design.

Joe Sokohl, a user experience specialist with over 15 years of experience, will be speaking at an hour-long session at DocTrain West this year. As part of the agenda for Changing the Rules of the Game for the Benefit of the User, he will be discussing how he's successfully employed personas to develop relevant and on-target training for his clients.