Symposia•Identity Crisis

The Persona as a Tool for Formulating and Evaluating Information Design

Developing effective technical documentation requires a variety of steps. Often, our process is restricted to:

Find out what we need to write
Write it
Deliver it

If we're very lucky, we get to revise it at some point in that process.

The problem arises, however, when actual users try to read or use our help systems. To help them better, we need to include a preliminary step identifying their needs and wants. This session explains how to locate and use demographic information to develop "personas" .

These documents create specific and individual, although fictional, users to whom we can write. Rather than defending our design, style, and tone decisions by invoking the amorphous user, we can cite specific, personalized reasons that determined our help system development.

Overview of the basic persona concept

We start by discussing the nature of a person document and how it can help serve to develop a tighter focus for document development. In addition, we will explore how gathering the information and presenting it can expand the role of the information developer in the enterprise.

Where to find market demographics

As fully-fledged members of the Information Age, we understand that demographic statistics help define the markets our companies sell to and, in fact, the products (or, in our case, the information deliverables) we create. However, we are often blocked from this crucial information by a variety of impediments. This segment of the session discusses some resources we can use to gather the demographic data that serves as the skeleton of our personas.

How to construct a persona

Just as the map is not the territory, demographics are not a persona. They can only tell us part of the story. With demographics, we still have nothing more than a slightly less amorphous user. This next segment of the persona explains how to flesh the demographics out and create a real biography of a "persona" that is as realistic, specific and detailed as possible.

How to use the persona

We'll discuss how to use the persona to guide documentation decisions, including platform, font size, tone and style, and other issues that can make or break a help system's usability.

About the Author…

Bonni Graham began writing as the "Lone Writer" for Data Trek, Inc., a library automation developer. She then moved on to Easel Corporation's ENFIN Technology Labs, working on object-oriented client-server development environments ("OO-La-La"). Currently Bonni owns a documentation business, Manual Labour, with clients like Hewlett-Packard, Xerox Document Sciences, and Kenwood USA.

For more information on this session e-mail Bonni.

Copyright © Information
This article may not be republished or redistributed by any means or under any circumstances whatsoever without the express written permission of the copyright owner, Bonni Graham. Single copies of this article may be reprinted for private use and for review purposes only. Excerpts from this article may be reproduced, provided the reproducing author/editor makes the appropriate citations referencing the article's original author and date of publication.
Copyright © 1995 Bonni Graham