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OUTCOMES

  • Gain a deep understanding of who you are designing for

  • Encapsulate a group of people as one person to have a simpler mental model of who you are designing for and easier communication with collaborators

 

USING THE TOOL

Creating a persona helps you to step ‘out of yourself’ and really understand who you're designing for by recognising your user's needs, habits, experiences, behaviours and goals. While a persona does not describe one real, specific person, it is composed based on real data collected from multiple people. Constantly refer back to these personas as you work and ask how they would react to your decisions. In this way the tool helps give you a common language about your audience between project partners and ultimately guides your whole process.

  1. Categorise research participants: When you have synthesised data from research done with real people, you can group your research participants into different categories based on relevant distinctions between them.

  2. Form your persona: Use these categorisations as the foundation for each persona by assimilating information about them into one artificial representation of the group.

  3. Detail your persona: Once you have this idea of who your persona is, answer the questions on the tool to form a static representation of a group of people.

  4. Name them: Then choose a name and image to represent them.

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good sequence

Interview > Persona > Journey Map

other names

Consumer profiles, Archetypes

Tips

  • Avoid using too many details in each persona that are not relevant to the context of the problem, as they could be misleading

  • However, include enough elements so you are able to picture who this persona represents

  • Avoid stereotypes and stock imagery. If you feel uncomfortable showing your persona to the actual people it represents, then it may not be a fair representation

  • It can be very helpful to arrange your personas into quadrants based on particular attributes that you find significant. In this way you can identify more accurately the users you are targeting or even what transformation you hope to help them with

 
 

TOOL

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References:

  1. https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/personas

  2. (1998) Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Sams.

  3. (2009) Frank Long, Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, research paper published in the Irish Ergonomics Review, Proceedings of the IES Conference 2009, Dublin

  4. (2009) Kim Goodwin, Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-centered Products and Services, John Wiley & Sons.