While personas are a very private, internal tool, Microsoft has a nice set of publicly known personas for its programming environments. (Microsoft also has less impressive, far less well-chosen personas for other products.)
Discussed in various places on the web, I have paraphrased the following Microsoft information from its original form on nikhik.net, written by Nikhail Kothari:
We have 3 primary personas in the developer division:
Mort is an opportunistic developer. He creates quick to implement solutions for immediate problems. He focuses on being productive and learns as needed.
Elvis is a pragmatic developer. He creates long lasting solutions within a product domain. Elvis learns about the domain in depth while working on the problem.
Einstein is a paranoid (their word J) developer. He likes to create the most efficient solution to a problem and typically researches the product domain and technology before beginning work on the solution.
While these are 2 sentence descriptions of far more detailed personas, you can probably already imagine how these personas might drive the implementation of a feature.
Nikhail presents the example of implementing security-related controls in Microsoft’s development software. Mort would probably prefer a control that just worked when dropped on the form. Elvis would likely need customization capabilities within the control. He might even want to make significant modifications to its default behavior. Meanwhile Einstein would probably expect the ability to investigate every behavior of the control or might even decide to re-implement its behavior entirely. Given these 3 different viewpoints – or expectations, or needs and desires, or skills and environment – it makes sense that:
- Mort is the primary persona for Visual Basic
- Elvis is the primary persona for Visual C#
- Einstein is the primary persona for .Net
Admittedly, there is a bit of controversy surrounding Mort, Elvis and Einstein. As I read it, some people are offended by the “pigeonholing” of the user. (Those offended are generally users of one or more of these products.) While I don’t agree with the criticism, I acknowledge that personas will always get this rap. Personas aren’t intended to pigeonhole the user. Personas are intended to be very useful implementation guides for the people implementing the product. We must be very careful to never to condescend to the user or their persona. (Remember Microsoft Bob? How about that !@#$ animated paperclip?)
Mort, Elvis an Einstein help the Microsoft developer make good feature implementation decisions in each of their programming environments. As a user of each one of these programming languages at different times and different project needs, I find these personas to be both enlightening and apt as implementation guides, but not as actual descriptions of who I am. I like it when a product works for me!
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