Personas
Alan Cooper first captured the idea of personas in his book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum [Coo99]. As he describes it, a persona is an archetype for a class of users our system needs to serve. Alan gives his personas names and personality types. It’s not enough to say that a user is an administrator. The user is Pradeep, a 34-year-old Microsoft Certified Professional.
Just as personas are useful for designing systems, they’re also useful for exploring systems. Adopting the mantle of a persona prompts you to interact with the software with a self-consistent set of assumptions, expectations, desires, and quirks.
Imagine you’re working on software for a business. How would these personas interact with the software differently? ...
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