08a Personas

App Prototyping Studio

Mick McQuaid
mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

12 Oct 2026

Week EIGHT

Exercise

Use generative AI to create four persona posters

Problem

  • Left to its own devices, generative AI will create generic personas and violate some rules I’m going to give you
  • You need a good prompt to get good results
  • This is an iterative process, where you develop your eye for what works through successive attempts
  • Don’t expect the first poster you get to be sufficient

Four Posters

  • One is for the primary persona, the person who is the primary user of your product
  • Two are for secondary personas, other people who use your product but are not the focus of your efforts
  • One is for an anti-persona, a person you are specifically not designing for
  • It should be possible to compare the four posters to each other and see the differences, so the layouts should be similar

Source material

  • The traditional source for personas is the affinity diagram you constructed earlier, in particular the highest level affinity labels for the primary persona
  • You should look at the lower level labels to get secondary personas and an anti-persona

Some rules

  • Each poster needs a stock photo of a person, not a cartoon and not a photo of a celebrity or a friend
  • Each poster needs some demographic information, such as age, gender,location,occupation, etc.
  • Each poster needs a quote from the person
  • Each poster needs a name for the person as the “title” of the poster (I find that Claude greatly overuses the name “Maya”)
  • Each poster needs some behavioral variables that help to distinguish the person from the other personas—I suggest bar charts
  • Each poster should be in landscape orientation so we can easily share it on-screen and read it at a distance
  • The layout should facilitate easy reading at a glance—don’t make us zoom in

Sharing

  • All four posters should go as PDFs into the aiPersona exercise assignment box
  • We’ll critique at least some of them in class

Timing

  • Let’s take 20 minutes to make the first draft of the primary persona
  • Then share that poster and discuss for 10 minutes
  • Then take 30 minutes to refine that poster and make the others
  • Then share them and take the rest of the time to discuss (15 minutes)

Literature

  • Cooper et al. (2014) is a book by the originator of the persona concept, outlining a complete design process that includes personas.
  • Pruitt and Grudin (2003) is an influential article about the misuse of personas at Microsoft soon after they were first introduced. Although the criticisms of personas in the article are outdated, the article is still used as a warning against bad persona practices

END

References

Cooper, Alan, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel. 2014. About Face 4.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley.
Pruitt, John, and Jonathan Grudin. 2003. “Personas: Practice and Theory.” DUX ’03: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences (New York, NY, USA), 1–15. https://doi.org/http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/997078.997089.

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