Abstract

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

"Many people think they know how to create personas—but they don’t. Hearsay knowledge gathered from surface browsing of a few websites and press releases is a scary and risky background for building a tool on which your user experience is supposed to rest. Better (and safer for your project) to learn from people like Adlin and Pruitt who actually know what they’re talking about. As this book shows, personas are not that hard, but there’s still more to them than what you can pick up from a blog posting. Read The Essential Persona Lifecycle or suffer." -- Jakob Nielsen, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group