Part of my responsibility as a Human Factors engineer is to write user personas. A personas is a fictitious character that embodies many of the characteristics of many users into one user. The persona is generated from customer data collected during interviews in the User-Centered Design process. A persona is only effective when it can be used to help solve design decisions when designing a product.

I was having a hard time writing personas because I had not generated any user interviews. However my coworker provided me the customer data I needed to get started. Having information to base the character off of made the persona creation much easier. It required quite a bit of creativity to be able to give details to the customer face, but once I got started, I enjoyed the process.

Today I sent out 4 personas to be critiqued by people who are in the same role as those I wrote about. Some of the elements that I used to give the personas their character was a handwritten quote at the top of the page written in the person’s own handwriting. I also included a photo, the character’s story or narrative some profile characteristics, and daily task lists. I am hoping that when I present the personas to the developers who will be using them, it will help give them insight to the needs of the people we are designing the software for.