The Essential Persona Lifecycle

Tamara Adlin is the Principal consultant at Adlin, Inc. She was formerly a Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com. For the past six years, John and Tamara have been researching and using personas, leading workshops, and teaching courses at professional conferences and universities. They developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals. John Pruitt is a User Research Manager for the Tablet and Mobile PC Division at Microsoft Corporation. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research for a number of products including Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, and MSN Explorer, versions 6, 7 & 8. Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory, in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy. John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published articles and chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than five years, continually developing a more rigorous approach to the method and mentoring numerous product teams at Microsoft and companies worldwide in adopting the technique. John has led workshops and spoken widely on the topic at both academic and industry events.

• Introduction: The Persona Lifecycle Phase 1: Planning a Persona Effort Phase 2: Creating Personas Phase 3: Launching and Communicating Personas Phase 4: Using Personas Phase 5: ROI and Reuse of Personas Conclusion

"Many people think they know how to create personas—but they don’t. Hearsay knowledge gathered from surface browsing of a few websites and press releases is a scary and risky background for building a tool on which your user experience is supposed to rest. Better (and safer for your project) to learn from people like Adlin and Pruitt who actually know what they’re talking about. As this book shows, personas are not that hard, but there’s still more to them than what you can pick up from a blog posting. Read The Essential Persona Lifecycle or suffer." --Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group