Defining personas for UX evaluations

After user roles, we define personas as prototypical users of a system for UX evaluations.

jordisan April 7, 2021 IN ENGLISH, personas, TECH, UCD (User-Centered Design), UCDmanager, UX (User eXperience), UX manager No Comments
Defining personas for UX evaluations

(TL;DR: personas at UX manager)

A persona is a description of an imaginary person who is an archetypical user of the system, and who may be used as a reference or inspiration when designing interfaces. Therefore, once we have defined the user roles involved in our system for UX evaluations, we can create some personas to make them more real.

Since we selected usability experts and frontend developers (as occasional evaluators) as focal roles, we have defined two personas, one for each of them:

These are primary personas who would require a dedicated interface; we may define other secondary personas whose needs would be met by the same interfaces used by primary personas.

Here you have those two personas in PDF format:

Susanna [PDF]Download
Marc [PDF]Download

Or better browse them online (as they might change in the future):

forUSE: usage-centered design (recovered)

Some articles about Usage-Centered Design by Constantine & Lockwood, recovered from their former forUSE website.

jordisan December 30, 2015 Constantine & Lockwood, IN ENGLISH, personas, TECH, UCD (User-Centered Design), UCDmanager, UX (User eXperience) 1 Comment

The usage-centered design approach to UX design (as defined by Constantine & Lockwood) has been always a reference to me. Their articles describe practical well-defined techniques which I think can (and should) be included in development processes, and my humble opinion is that it deserves more attention than it gets.

Usage-centered design itself has been viewed as providing already established and effective methods for putting activity-centered design into practice and for overcoming some of the stated shortcomings of human-centered design (Norman, 2006).

Actually, I used their descriptions of techniques for Personas, User Roles and (Abstract) Use Cases as the basis for their implementation into UCDmanager. One of the main reasons for this choice is that they set the basis for a design methodology which includes different interrelated techniques, instead of the toolbox of heterogeneous independent methods we usually have.

Sadly, it seems that their forUSE website is no longer active (although it still can be accessed through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine). That’s why I’m recovering here some of their articles. (more…)