Create Personas To Represent The People You Are Writing To - Page 8

When you write as if you were someone else, fitting into his or her skin, you are adopting a persona. But Alan Cooper, inventor of Visual Basic, suggests creating a persona for each important segment of your audience to give a personal face to the group's prominent characteristics, and to get past the blandness of demographic generalizations. In his book The Inmates are Running the Asylum, Cooper advocates using personas during the design of software. As you try to make sense out of what you have learned about the people who consume your text, you may find his approach helpful in planning your writing, particularly if you already have a taste for fiction.

A persona is a made-up person you will write to. A real person may have several different goals in mind, but a persona is built around a single goal or one main objective. Every time you spot a different goal, you create a new persona.

Remember that a goal is the persona's purpose, not a set of tasks. Too often we focus on the tasks the "average" user might want to accomplish, particularly if that sucker does what our management wants and buys, buys, buys. Task thinking quickly leads to decorating the site's functions with labels and help, assuming, for instance, that everyone has the same reason for using the shopping cart, and therefore offering the same boring FAQ text to everyone. (What if some people are just using the shopping cart to hold products they might buy, but fear they will never find again, in your confusing morass of a site?) Emphasizing one goal per persona helps you get your mind out of the gearbox.

Is this then a touch? Quivering me to a new identity. — Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Once you have a persona's goal clearly defined, you dress the character up. Assign a name, an age, an employer, a daily routine, and a car, but not just any car—a particular car with a dent on the front right bumper. The specificity is important because it helps you believe in your own creation. For instance, starting from the fact that many consumers come to your site with the goal of deciding which kind of printer to buy, you might create a persona named Emma Aragon.

Emma is a 35-year-old mother of Adrian (12), Lucero (10), and Jose (6). Her husband Herb is the head of the morning shift down at the Sears Auto Parts shop at the Coronado Mall. She works as an architect of one-family homes in a three-architect firm, Aragon, Carter and Rodriguez, in downtown. She's responsible for meeting potential clients, interviewing them, preparing preliminary estimates, sketching out floor plans, refining the design, working with the engineering team on air, electrical, and plumbing plans, preparing budgets, supervising contractors during construction, meeting with the partners to plan expanding their practice into oȘce buildings and manufacturing plants. She has a Masters in Architecture from the University of New Mexico, and is working on a Masters in Business Administration through the Anderson School of Management at UNM (only two more years of night and weekend courses). She drives a six-year-old white Ford pickup with a dream-catcher hanging from the mirror. Her concerns include daycare for her youngest child and healthcare for her grandmother Elisa Baca, who lives in the house next door. She is also concerned about the poor quality of her neighborhood elementary school, Los Gallegos, which regularly ranks in the bottom third of all schools in the state. For blueprints, she uses AutoCad but hates its interface, and for presentations to clients, she uses consumer programs such as 3D Architect, because the results look more attractive and help clients imagine what the house will look like. Her main objective is to create such imaginative designs that when her clients move into their new homes, they are delighted. She expects her drafting software to offer technical precision as a minimum, but as an experienced designer, what she really seeks is flexibility.

You want to create a character you can believe. Borrow facts from the people you have actually met, but do not just copy wholesale from a real person. Build in the details that will influence what you write. If you succeed at developing a believable character, you will stop letting yourself assume that if a sentence makes sense to you, it will do. Now you have to make sense to Emma.

We must produce more selves for newer situations because, in William James's sense, the number of social selves is growing rapidly. — Robert Weber, The Created Self

You escape the conventional idea of skills, too. You begin to see that individuals have expert skills in some areas, but novice abilities in other areas. No one person is a complete idiot. By focusing on goals, you can get away from the easy but simplistic distinction between power users and beginners, a distinction that was probably first created to excuse failures in interface design and programming ("Well, any power user could manage this feature," or "Well, we know beginners can't figure this out, so we provide a wizard for those dummies.") A persona helps you focus on the main activities this kind of person wants to carry out, pursuing her goal, encountering your text as part of the interface, and then as meaningful content. A persona embodies a niche audience in action, following an intention through your prose. Now you are in a virtual conversation with an individual, and your prose takes on a warmer tone.

Serious creations of the self, like the inventions of technology, have the capacity of transfiguring life and society. — Robert Weber, The Created Self

Develop a cast of personas and then winnow the list down. You might create a few dozen, then recognize similarities, toss out redundancies, and end up with six or seven. Give top priority to any persona who must be satisfied with your text, and who cannot be satisfied with text intended for someone else. In this way you end up with a set of "real" people you are writing to, like familiar e-mail correspondents, and you can create targeted text for each.

To create a product that must satisfy a broad audience of users, logic will tell you to make it as broad in its functionality as possible to accommodate the most people. Logic is wrong. (Cooper 1999).

You're going to create content for each persona. You're not going to make one persona read something that's really intended for another, the way a magazine site often does. "The broader a target you aim for, the more certainty you have of missing the bull's eye," says Cooper.

And, because you come to envision each persona as if he or she were a living person, you develop a unique relationship with the persona, and your tone reflects that, making your style more, well, personal.

Lumping People Together Into Small Groups - Page 7
Hot Text: Web Writing that Works
Personalize, Honestly - Page 9