If you ask any designer or user experience (UX) professional what it takes to create a successful product design, you will mostly likely hear that the number one critical success factor is knowing your user. One much talked about tool to help with knowing your user is the persona.

The use of personas as a design tool originated in Alan Cooper’s 1999 book [1]. As a result of that book, personas swiftly gained traction in software development as a tool for building a shared understanding of one’s users. While the use of personas has helped many design successful products, persona efforts can be difficult and often fail.

In this book, Adlin and Pruitt endeavor to provide the tools and methods necessary to create and sustain a successful persona effort. As described by the authors, this book is essentially the condensed, how-to version of their previous 700-plus-page persona book [2]. This new book focuses solely on the what and how, leaving the why to the original book. (I should note that I have not read the first book.)

The book is organized around the five phases of the persona life cycle: persona family planning; persona conception and gestation; persona birth and maturation; persona adulthood; and persona lifetime achievement, reuse, and retirement.

While I understand that personas are intended to serve as representations of real users, mapping the persona process to phases of human development struck me as odd and unsettling. And, to be honest, terms such as “family planning” and “conception and gestation” were not helpful when it came to remembering the purpose of, and what needed to be done in, each phase. I had a hard time taking the content seriously.

In this persona guide, the authors walk readers through the entire persona process, from identifying whether personas are a good match for your project to measuring the success of your persona effort. Their handling of what needs to be done is very thorough and comprehensive. Their coverage of how to do it, however, varies. For example, the book provides little detail on how to gather the data used in creating personas, but ample information when it comes to actually turning the data into a persona.

Although the book is not much over 200 pages, do not expect it to be a quick read. With 8.5 x 11-inch pages that are filled from top to bottom, it takes time to get through. The authors do try to break up the content with frequent images, “Handy Detail” tips, and interesting “Story from the Field” sections.

One concern I had with this book was that it made the persona process feel very heavy. While the authors acknowledge that the persona process should be tailored to one’s time and resource constraints, walking readers through every possible persona activity suggests that the persona effort can be quite daunting. Similarly, although the authors did not spend much time in this area, the book seemed to focus on persona use in a waterfall process. It would have been interesting for the book to include an outline of which steps are critical in an agile or lean UX environment.

All in all, this book is quite a complete guide on how to create and use personas. When deciding whether or not to invest in this book, the parent book [2] is definitely worth a first look.