This is a repository of personas. The concept is to create reusable bunch of personas that can be used over and over again by different groups in the library (and perhaps outside). They are typically used in User Stories to provide more concrete user scenarios, although many people write user stories without them. They can also be used in other contexts as well, where it is helpful to have defined users.
The personas are all in the Wiki. The Wiki home page is a directory. Each persona gets their own wiki page. You should be able to search on full text as well. (Let me know how that works).
To use them, just link to them, copy and paste, or what ever works best. I've made them CC-0 so that there are no issues with re-use.
Feel free to add personas. Just try to avoid duplication. There are no hard and fast rules, but there are best practices. Here are a few.
- Base them on real people.
- Do research as required
- They can and probably should be composites
- Do not use real peoples names
- I use a random name generator.
- A list of names is in the files. If you use that, remove the name you used.
- Pictures help some people
- User Interfaces supplies pics that people have releaesd for this use.
- Provide enough detail to make the persona useful
- This will vary with purpose
- The detail should help guide development of a service or feature
- Some people like more fluff than others (i.e. how they enjoy work might be good, how often they walk their dog is too much?)
- Given that these are for general use, some detail may be more important for you than others.
If you want to edit a persona do so judiciously, but really the goal is to make this a community project.
- Edit the Wiki homepage by adding a slug for the persona you wish to add as shown here
[[Random Citizen - User Tag|Random-Citizen]]. The first part, before the vertical bar, is the name and a descriptive tag and is displayed. The second part is the URI to the persona as another Wiki Page. Github will use the second part to generate a title for the page preserving the capitals and replacing the dashes with spaces. - Save the changes to thw Wiki homepage, and you will see that the link is red because the link is dead. Click it and Github will generate a new page automatically at that URI.
- Copy and paste the persona template into the editor.
- Replace the image with a new one from User Interfaces.
- Replace the name with one from the names list and remove that name from the list.
- Write the persona to suit the needs of the project you are on.
- Save the changes to the persona.
If you are unsure, submit a pull request (ask me Rob Olendorf, to help if you want).
There may be need to cull, or edit personas. Please don't take this personally.
The best way to communicate a suggestion, question, comment, problem, or anything else is to submit an issue on this repository's issue tracker. Just click [New Issue], write what you need to write and click [Submit new issue].
The best way to get help is open an issue here. This way the question and answer will be available for everyone. You can email me too. (Rob Olendorf)