Personas

Information & Interaction Design

Mick McQuaid

mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

17 Aug 2026

Week FIVE

Recap, Previously on Info & Interaction Design

Contextual Inquiry

Mood boards

Picking up a key

Protocol and verbal analysis

protocol analysis \(\rightarrow\) think-aloud process

verbal analysis \(\rightarrow\) knowledge representation

Outputs

The output of protocol analysis \(\rightarrow\) process map

The output of verbal analysis \(\rightarrow\) knowledge map

Personas

Use Cooper et al. (2014)

Cooper invented personas at Microsoft

Reading Cooper

Structuring your reading

Table of contents

Orange headings

Black headings

Boldface terms

Italicized emphasis

Figures with sequences

Figures with comparisons

Examples

Justifications

Answering objections

References

Order of presentation

Most of the items in the list are self-explanatory. The last one, though, needs a little explanation. The order in which Chapter 3 is presented could be called a series of steps, including think, do, and reflect. First, the authors present the idea of personas, then tell you how to do them, then reflect on some of the thoughts you might have as a result of experience with personas or with alternative methods. This organizing principle might remind you of the plan-do-check-act cycle that is a foundation of quality improvement work. You could think of learning a new approach to interaction design as an example of quality improvement work. If you do, then you might think about integrating aspects of the persona approach into your larger toolbox, the lifelong toolbox you will carry with you outside of school.

Personas are models

Why model?
- Only care about salient features
- Only care about relevant behavior patterns

Composite archetypes
- Not stereotypes
- Arises from research, e.g., contextual inquiry

Designing for many constituencies

Increases cognitive load

Increases navigational overhead

Instead, identify specific individuals with specific needs

Example for cars

Alesandro wants to go fast and have fun

Marge wants to be safe and be comfortable

Dale wants to haul big loads and be reliable

Is there one car for all three?

What personas help the designer do

Determine what a product should do

Communicate with stakeholders

Build consensus and commitment

Measure the design’s effectiveness

Contribute to other product-related efforts

Design pitfalls that personas avoid

Elastic user (license to build what you please)

Self-referential design (developer as user)

Edge cases (shouldn’t be focus, even when designed for)

Why personas are effective

Personification engages empathy

Research basis grounds personas in measured reality

They are context-specific: one persona for one product

Their motivations are explored

Cognitive processing levels, from Norman (2005)

Visceral

Behavioral

Reflective

Goals corresponding to the three levels

Experience goals

End goals

Life goals

Motivations corresponding to the three goals

The user wants to feel

The user wants to do

The user wants to be

PDCA

The PDCA cycle

The stations of the cycle

The PDCA cycle can be traversed over and over, indefinitely. There are four main stations of the cycle.

Plan investigations to understand the current situation

Do implement short term fixes and long term plans to overcome root causes of problems

Check to see the effects of implementing fixes and plans

Act to standardize fixes and plans that succeed

Also see Pruitt and Grudin (2003).

END

References

Chi, Michelene T. H. 1997. “Quantifying Qualitative Analyses of Verbal Data: A Practical Guide.” The Journal of the Learning Sciences (Mahwah, NJ, USA) 6 (3): 271–315.

Cooper, Alan, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher Noessel. 2014. About Face 4.0: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Wiley.

Ericsson, K. Anders, and Herbert A. Simon. 1984. Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data. MIT Press.

Norman, Donald A. 2005. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. Basic Books.

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.

Colophon

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