The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas

by Tamara Adlin, John Pruitt

The Essential Persona Your Guide to Building and Using Personas offers a practical guide to the creation and use of personas, which can help product designers, their team, and their organization become more user focused. This book is for people who just need to know what to do and what order to do it in. It is completely focused on practical tools and methods, without much explanation on why the particular tool or method is the right one. The book discusses the five phases of persona

Genres: Design, Nonfiction, Business, Research

240 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2010

Reviews

[David Munoz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gives a great overview of what personas are and how to construct them. I'm a master's student in human-computer interaction and have learned the use of personas from an academic viewpoint so it's great to read about how industry professionals use personas in their work. Given the authors' backgrounds, a lot of the book focuses on larger-scale deployment of personas within corporations. This task is certainly commendable but is a rather isolated use case for personas. I would have liked to have read more about shorter-term projects and how they benefited from persona use since the company-wide persona development efforts mentioned in the book often take months, if not years. With that said, the most generalizable chapters are 4 and 6 that describe how to develop personas. Again, there are certainly many cases of how to create personas for projects that may last anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, but more detail on these use cases would have been nice.

[Matt Watkinson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent advice, unfortunately buried under more waffle than Belgium.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

A nice look at key points over lifetime of personas as a design artifact. A lot of repeated exposition about personas and the "persona method" without a strong stance on the most important part of personas: their goals (see Cooper's GDD.) There are also useful practical suggestions around the many phases of operationalizing personas, and different ways they can be used in software design and development. I wouldn't recommend this book as a primer or introduction to using personas (find talk videos by Kim Goodwin), but useful to more experienced design & research practitioners as a source of ideas and techniques to sharpen practice of developing & employing personas.

[Lance Cookson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good primer and reference guide on persona generation. The earlier book provides much greater information and case studies, but this book serves as a great jumping off point for people new to persona creation. If you've been tasked with creating personas for your project this is a very rich resource for you.