Skip to main content

Enterprise MSF Agile (with CobiT)

Go Search
Home
  
Enterprise MSF Agile (with CobiT) > Wiki Pages > Activity - Define Personas  

Activity - Define Personas

Activity Information

Define Personas

Description

A persona is a fictional individual who represents of a group of users. Personas are used to reason through the needs of an entire customer segment by examining the characteristics of one fictional individual. To define a persona, examine the customer segment that interacts with the system, collect the skills, abilities, and goals the user group shares, and create a fictional person to represent the customer segment.

 

Personas are a means of elaborating information about users from the vision statement. Personas are used to create scenarios and conduct exploratory testing.

Roles

PerformerBusiness Analyst

Steps

  1. Define Roles:
    From the users identified in the vision statement, choose a user group that interacts with the system.

    If the vision statement does not contain enough information to determine all user types, gather more information on the intended users. The vision statement often contains role clusters or sets of roles such as a user or administrator.

    If the system houses assets that might lead to security requirements, be sure to include disfavored personas such as unauthorized users.

  2. Create Persona:
    Gather real data to create a persona. Use data obtained from usability studies, user visits, focus groups, and marketing studies to make sure the persona represents reality.

    Group the related knowledge, skills, and abilities with the goals of the persona. Open a new persona template for each grouping. Complete the persona descriptions by including a short life history, personality quirks, or interests and hobbies. Adding personal details makes the persona more realistic. Include links back to data used to build the persona.

    Name the persona with a realistic name and save the persona using the name as its file name. Publish the persona to the project portal.

Inputs and Outputs

WorkProductInputOutputAllowable States
Persona(none)

Predecessors

TypeNameDependency Type
Write Vision StatementFinish-Start

Successors

TypeNameDependency Type
Create a Quality of Service RequirementFinish-Start
Create a ScenarioFinish-Start
Refine PersonasFinish-Start

Last modified at 1/17/2008 11:18 PM  by Administrator