Persona Books

As you may know, I recently taught a tutorial on Data-driven Design Research Personas at this year’s UPA conference. Since then, I’ve had a few people ask me if there are any good books on personas out there. Well, while I don’t think the personas book has been published yet, I do think these two have some great insights into personas.

Making the Web Work: Designing Effective Web Applications by Bob Baxley. This book has a good overview chapter on creating personas.

The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web by Steven Molder. This book is more of a practitioners’ guide to personas.

Which one is missing?
You probably notice that I didn’t include The Persona Lifecycle : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design by Pruitt and Adlin. I’m not a fan of the book. While there is some good information in this book, specifically about the different cycles like development, birth, maturation, and retirement, which you’ll find in my Data-driven Design Research Personas presentation. At 700 pages, the book is simply too much. This book follows the Microsoft approach of “let’s make sure we don’t leave anything out.” And while in theory that sounds good, the entire point of personas is to understand the audience and make sure you design for them. I think the authors of this book should have created some personas for the book and designed the book based on that. So, my advice on this one, check it out at the local library, but it’s not one I’d tell anyone to purchase.