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

Personas play an essential role in the development of successful products. Without creating profiles of target customers and studying them throughout your product development lifecycle, it's impossible to truly understand user need, context, and pain points. The Essential Persona Lifecycle is an easy-to-reference guide on persona creation, use, and evaluation. Whether you are a student or a UX practitioner, if you are developing products that people are intended to use, this book is for you.

• 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

About the Authors

Tamara Adlin is the president of adlin, inc., a user experience strategy company in Seattle, Washington. Tamara's focus is on…focus! She's an expert at wrangling executive teams until they agree on a shared, crystal-clear, and prioritized set of key users and their goals; she believes that teams who can develop and stick with a solid focus on their users are in the best position to create really great products. She has tons of fun running workshops with executives, and then diving in to help teams who are working ‘in the trenches’ to design and develop great products. Tamara co-authored The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design with John Pruitt, has been featured in several other books, and has been invited to speak on user experience strategy all over the world. In her recent work life, Tamara co-founded Fell Swoop, a user experience design company, and she ran a customer experience and usability team at Amazon.com. She cut her professional teeth at a series of Seattle tech startups after getting her Master's Degree in Technical Communication from the University of Washington. Today, she's happily focusing on practical methods that help business people increase their bottom lines by focusing on their customers, and she's got her work cut out for her.

John Pruitt is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft, currently working on the next version of SharePoint as part of the Microsoft Office 2010 suite of products. Since joining Microsoft in 1998, he has conducted user research and designed UI for several versions of Windows (including Windows 98SE, 2000, ME, XP, and Vista) as well as Microsoft's integrated Internet client, MSN Explorer (versions 6, 7, and 8), and innovative mobile PCs like the Tablet PC and the super small form factor UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC). 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 a variety of journal articles and book 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 10 years, continually developing his approach and mentoring numerous product teams around Microsoft and companies worldwide. John co-authored the book, The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, with Tamara Adlin, and has presented broadly on the topic of personas at both academic and industry events.