Personas when testing

[Kim]

Do your teams use personas? We have a growing client base and when designing new user workflows our design team especially uses personas.

These are created in collaboration with the product owner and have some basis in the truth. By this I mean that we have a lot of IT professionals that use our product as well as creatives who maybe are not as techy and use those as our base to define who will use the new feature.

I am struggling to sometimes put aside my knowledge and pretend I am this persona. Do you use personas? Do you use them for testing or just for designing new features?

[Hilary]

I haven’t come accross the use of personas though I do try to imagine how a real user would navigate the system. You not only need to put aside your technical knowledge but also have some understanding of the user’s knowledge. Often they will be far more familiar with the way the system behaves than the tester will. Certainly they will know more about the business process the system should support. Misunderstanding those processes will lead to user unfriendly systems.

You would need different personas to represent an ‘old hand’ who would wants to be able to carry out tasks in a minimum of steps and a ‘newbie’ who will need a clearly signposted route to complete a task.

[Jesper]

Personas is an interesting and well-established way to do illustrate the profiles of the users – my favorite, is to combine it with LEGO minifigures http://www.ministryoftesting.com/2013/06/the-build-a-tester-workshop/

[Author]

Posts