Today we're going to talk about a fun little game called Personas.

No, not that Persona, though I hear it's a pretty fun game to play. Today we're going to talk about the Personas approach to user experience and design. I have done this several times in the course of my personal career and I was amused to see that the US government website has an official website about the personas exercise.

How Personas Works

Designers use the personas exercise to better understand the audience a website or web application serves. It's the first part of the larger design process and informs both the user experience and how features are prioritized. It all comes down to asking a couple basic questions.

• Who are the users of the site?
• Why are these users here?
• What expectations do they have?
• What needs do they have?

Unraveling the RetroMud Hive Mind

Rita and I got together in person for our journey into the mind of the typical Retro Player. Solly Ross, a friend of mine from the Open Source community, joined us for the exercise both to help me introduce Rita to this process and to help break our assumptions with an outsider's perspective. We identified seven unique personalities for our audience.

• The First Time User
  • wants to get started with the game
    • how do I connect?
    • what is telnet?
  • wants to join the community
    • how do I learn more?
    • how do I start?
• Newbie Player Learning the Game
  • wants to look up what their abilities do
  • wants to look up what they get from levels
  • wants to look up how to steer their character
  • wants to learn about equipment
  • wants to learn about exploring and places
  • wants to join up with other people
• PowerGamer
  • wants to know what equipment they can get next
  • wants to research combinations of guilds
  • wants to sell high end loot
  • wants to schedule parties
• Role Player
  • wants to know more about the lore
  • wants to find other roleplayers
  • wants to write personal lore
  • wants to know how to roleplay
• Staff Member
  • wants to look up docs for using our mudlib
  • wants to find paths for items in game
  • want to link bug reports to those items
  • wants to look up coding style guides
  • wants to look up comprehensive game design guidelines
  • wants to post up to the blog
• Community Moderator
  • wants to review profiles
  • wants to remove and edit offensive wiki content
  • wants to ban non-staff users who violate community rules
  • wants to approve wiki changes
• The Curmudgeon (tm)
  • wants to hate everything we propose
  • wants to see us cry
  • wants to view our site on Windows 95 over dial up with no scripts

Okay, while that last persona started as a joke, the bullet point about supporting Windows 95 over dial up connections with no scripts is actually something sent to me as a bug report. I see a few more things we should add from writing up this blog post, however, the whole personas process gave us a much better insight into how the new site should work.

Next Steps

Our personas are the foundation for the new website. No matter how many times I do the personas exercise it's always fun to watch how it melts away design clutter. Next week we'll look at the sketches for the new site design and talk about how they fulfill the goals set out by the personas exercise.

Tune in next week for Website 3.0: Sketches.