Making personas memorable

Abstract

Although Cisco's tag line for fiscal year 2007 is "Lead the Experience," not all Cisco product teams have historically focused on designing products that facilitate user success and delight. The Cisco User Experience Design (UXD) Group provides tools that stimulate a UXD culture, one of which is personas to catalyze a common understanding of users and a centralized persona database. The challenge has been that engineers at Cisco could opt out of using personas. This UXD Group therefore had to produce personas and artifacts that increase the fun and the stickiness of persona characteristics as a basis for product design. In November 2005, the UXD team won an award for developing best practices in product development for creating these personas by vice presidents from across Cisco.