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Figure 5 - User personas can be instrumental in defining the users experience.
One of the pioneers of personas is interactive design consultant, Alan Cooper, founder
of a company that bears his name. In one of his blog posts, Cooper recalls designing a pro-
ject management program in the early '80s. He describes his creation of a fictional user
based on a real employee at an advertising company. He named this new persona after her
real-life model: Kathy. Her job was to assure that projects were properly staffed, and that
the staffers were being used to their full potential. She was obviously a member of the tar-
get audience for Cooper's new program. “I would engage myself in a dialogue, play-acting
a project manager, loosely based on Kathy requesting functions and behavior from my pro-
gram,” Cooper writes. “I often found myself deep in those dialogues, speaking aloud, and
gesturing…”
Cooper goes on to say that this “play-acting” technique was successful because it
helped him with issues of functionality. The more he imagined Kathy operating the pro-
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