What are Use Scenarios and Personas?
What are Use Scenarios and Personas?
Use Scenarios
A use Scenario is a story or narrative—a thought experiment that is used to help you explore the set of tasks and interactions required for your design. A good use scenario does a number of things:
- Describes the user’s goals and motivations.
- Describes a specific task or tasks that need to be accomplished.
- Describes some of the interaction, with enough detail to make it compelling, but not so much detail as to be overwhelming.
- Provides a shared understanding for everyone on your team about what a user might want to do and how they might do it.
- Helps you construct the sequence of events that are necessary to address in your user interface.
- Can be sketchy, as long as it provokes ideas and discussion.
Personas
A Persona (also known as an archetypal user) is an invented person that you use to represent a type of user in your use scenario.
For more information about personas, see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/personas-practice-and-theory.pdf and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/PersonaBook.pdf.