Personas

What

Personas are visual and anecdotal profiles. They may be based on ‘real people’ from research or they may have been ‘made-up’ in a brainstorm session. By profile we mean information about the person that is illustrative and useful to the project - it should identify the key characteristics of the person. Posing questions and answering them as the persona character is often helpful to build up a character - quirky or unusual questions are often more insightful.

A group of personas

It can be useful to build an information model that the personas should describe - this is useful for really detailed personas and ensures all relevant areas have been covered. Areas to build information for persona’s around include:

• People
• Behaviours and attitudes
• Skills
• Goals
• Time
• Places
• Personality
• Consumerism

When building our characters we are mindful that there should be a correct balance between contextual insight and holistic insight, concerning emotional, qualitative and lifestyle issues. Often, too much is made of the archetypes personality.

During workshops we like to use empathetic personas as a warm-up activity. This involves participants finishing a persona that has already been half developed - in hope that the participant will empathize with the character as they have played a part in creating it.

Filling in a persona board

What you get

A persona is simply an image of a person with tailored information about their lifestyle, behaviour and attitude. A creative approach should be taken to designing the imagery, language, look and feel of a persona so it is presented in a visually compelling and digestible format. Multiple personas will be based on the same information model for coherency and comparison.

When to use it

Personas can be used for a number of different reasons during different stages of the design process. For example to;

• act as stimulus to fuel idea generation
• a useful tool to refer to and consider during the design process
• aid product and proposition development
• archetypically represent each segment of an organizations market

In service design personas are often followed by building customer journeys - this determines how a particular person experiences a service.