A Wealth of Personas

Personas to help UX teams understand how to design for people with disabilities have been popping up on the web.

We love personas and created a group of web user personas to help illustrate A Web for Everyone. While our personas are a good staring point, the most effective personas represent the people in a particular context. We love these two examples of personas for university students and banking customers.

Personas of university students

For example, the BC Open Text Accessibility Toolkit, extended and adapted our personas for people who create textbooks, so the personas represent  different types of students. Their goal is to help everyone create “a truly open and accessible textbook” because today anyone from an instructional designer to a professor might be a content creator.

To make the more specific to the context, they focused on students with print disabilities, based on data about the tools that university students use and their own focus groups. As an added bonus, they included samples of the assistive technology each persona might use.

Personas of banking customers

It’s not surprising to find open access educational projects, but the Barclay’s IT Accessibility Team has made their personas open source to allow others to benefit from their research.

The Barclay’s Diverse Personas are published as a PDF booklet or as a Word file.

Each person includes the top design tips and a detailed profile with information about how they use technology, their life and goals, and banking products they use.

If you are interested in how the team uses the personas, take a look at the case study in the Slideshare presentation Building Accessible Apps: Barclay’s Mobile Banking. It shows how they switched from a single accessibility evaluation at the end — too late to make changes — to ongoing accessibility reviews, starting from the design phase.