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

The Essential Persona Lifecycle: 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 lifecycle:

• Family planning ― Basic ideas and a few tools that will help one get organized
• Conception and gestation ― Step-by-step instructions to move from assumptions to completed personas
• Birth and maturation ― Strategic techniques to get the right information about ones personas out to ones your teammates at the right time
• Adulthood ― Specific tools that will ensure that ones personas are used by the right people at the right times and in the right ways during the product development cycle
• Lifetime achievement and retirement ― Basic ideas and a few tools to you measure the success of the persona effort and prepare for the next one

• Practical and immediately applicable how-to reference guide for building and using personas – from planning, creating, launching, evaluating, and determining ROI
• Invaluable guide that gives you a quick reference for incorporating personas into a product development process
• Features all the essential how-to material from its parent book, The Persona Lifecycle, as a quick, at your fingertips companion

Tamara Adlin is the Principal consultant at Adlin, Inc. She was formerly a Customer Experience Manager at Amazon.com. For the past six years, John and Tamara have been researching and using personas, leading workshops, and teaching courses at professional conferences and universities. They developed the Persona Lifecycle model to communicate the value and practical application of personas to product design and development professionals.

John Pruitt is a User Research Manager for the Tablet and Mobile PC Division at Microsoft Corporation. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research for a number of products including Windows 98SE, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP, and MSN Explorer, versions 6, 7 & 8. Prior to Microsoft, he was an invited researcher in the Human Information Processing Division of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Laboratory, in Kyoto, Japan, and also worked as a civilian scientist doing simulation and training research for the U.S. Navy.

John holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of South Florida and has published articles and chapters on usability methods, skill training, naturalistic decision-making, speech perception and second-language learning. He has been creating and using personas for more than five years, continually developing a more rigorous approach to the method and mentoring numerous product teams at Microsoft and companies worldwide in adopting the technique. John has led workshops and spoken widely on the topic at both academic and industry events.