Model users: 'personas'
In following up on the topic of Persona driven design processes, we wanted to highlight that the WCAG Guidelines actually provide example personas for designer. "Stories of Web Users" offer character centred scenarios. While not actual persons nor comprehensively addressing every kind of disability, the characters illustrate and challenge designers to consider users with a range of needs and goals. https://www.w3.org/WAI/people-use-web/user-stories/
Personas offer a cast of synthetic characters complete with values, personal histories, needs and goals. Personas are not average demographic 'types', they are individual characters whose biographical detail allows designers to 'imagine' the persona's individual aspirations, choices and behaviour as realistic, plausible, meaningful. It is simply another way for designers to generate empathy with their users. It enables them to build up a cast of characters, socialised and known among the design team, in order to focus the team's design attention, to enable and contain design ideation, development action, testing, user acceptance, etc. A persona is employed as a shared sense making device, a fictional 'identity' or a character who is imagined in putative roles wherein some future version of the product is employed. These design strategies occupy the conceptual boundary between the design-world and the use-world. Each persona can be used to...
“Develop a precise description of our user and what he wishes to accomplish.” (Cooper, 2004) “Personas are not real people, but they are based on the behaviours and motivations of real people we have observed and represent them throughout the design process. They are composite archetypes based on behavioural data gathered from the many actual users encountered in ethnographic interviews.” (Cooper et al., 2007)
We can use “personas” or special classes of users as representative clients/user/consumers in order to overcome the impossibility of maintaining dialog with each and every participant.
Further reading
For example: Lee, online shopper with color blindness (link)
[Cooper, 2004] Cooper, A. (2004). The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Sams, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA.
[Cooper et al., 2007] Cooper, A., Reimann, R., and Cronin, D. (2007). About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. John Wiley & Sons, Indianapolis, Indiana.
