Design Thinking

Chapter 3Personas: Powerful Tool for Designers

Robert Chen

LG Electronics

Jeanny Liu

University of La Verne

Introduction

During the past decade, personas in product design have received much attention from academicians and innovative companies (Blomquist & Arvola, 2002; Chapman & Milham, 2006; Faily & Flechais, 2011), an interest that is part of a positive trend toward building user-centric products. Personas provide designers with a user-centric reference tool that depicts an ideal user (Cooper, Reimann, & Cronin, 2014). This tool allows designers to maintain focus on the ideal user as they explore and develop solutions. This chapter explores personas as a practical tool for design. Many of the examples are software and technology oriented, but personas apply similarly to other product categories. We organize this chapter into several sections:

1. Defining personas—practical descriptions, underlying bases, and common types
2. Importance of personas—exploring the power of using personas during product development:
   1. During design
   2. During development
   3. As a communication tool
3. Creating personas—an overview of creating personas from ethnographic research
4. Illustrative application of personas—an example from three areas during product development
5. Limitations of personas—constraints and mitigation

In this chapter, we define designers broadly as cross-functional members of a team tasked with developing user-facing product solutions. We define user-facing solutions as product features with ...