TC Design
Persona
- Dan Larmour
What is a persona?
A persona is a visual artefact that we create to represent a subset (or group) of your target audience who have similar behaviours, goals, motivations, and needs, as they relate to your product or service.
We can take in a lot of data about users from various research activities, but often the raw research is scattered throughout various reports, spreadsheets, tools, and audio/video recordings. Personas help to humanize and visualize all this complex data, which ultimately makes it easier to consume and remember.
Personas are an important artefact because they help the development team step outside of themselves and remove personal biases when developing product or service solutions. By creating a shared understanding of user needs across the development team and stakeholders, personas help us remember and apply what we know about our users so that we make informed design decisions. It’s powerful when people mention the name of a persona when they are speaking about someone’s needs rather than saying “the users”.
There are two main types of personas: Lean and Complex.
Lean persona
Lean personas are typically either goal-directed or role-based and focus on the user’s role within an organization. It is generally recommended to use a Lean persona when designing enterprise products and services for employees because they are focused more on the need of the user’s role within the organization, rather than the individual person’s needs.
For example, Marine cargo inspectors can be young and old, male and female, just starting their career or finishing their career, they might have kids or they might not, but they still need to accomplish the same task of inspecting a cargo ship and determining whether or not it meets certain standards. Similarly, all employees are issued a tablet or laptop so we know what type of equipment they are using.
The types of information you will find in a lean persona typically include the following:
Name or title i.e. Analyst Annie or Inspector Ian
Background context - what is the context of the persona’s role within the organization
Short description of the role
Goals - tangible things that the persona is trying to achieve in their day-to-day activities
Needs/tasks - what does the persona need to accomplish their Goals (feel free to write Needs in terms of the product or service you are designing)
Pain points/frustrations/barriers - things that prevent the persona from accomplishing their goals in the most efficient and desirable way
Complex persona
Complex persona include more attitudinal and demographic information. For example, if you are looking at the experience of getting a passport, based on demographics, attitudes, and values, that experience will look quite different for a 50 year old person who just became a Canadian citizen and is applying for a passport for the first time compared to a 30 year old person that has lived in Canada for their entire life and is getting their first passport before going on vacation.
For more information on Complex Personas, refer to Lene Nielsen’s (Interaction Design Foundation) 10-step process for creating effective personas.
When to use personas?
Personas should be used to guide and inform conversations, activities and product or service design decisions throughout every phase of the UX Process, whether you are collaborating with the development team, project stakeholders, or even users themselves.
For example, refer to personas in your backlog items instead of using the generic “user” term. When you discuss the item in refinement and planning, refer to the value that you will deliver to that persona. Personas are also quite effective for focusing conversations in sprint reviews when stakeholders make new business requests or suggest changing the priority of backlog items.
How to create a persona
There are four main steps to creating effective personas: (1) collect and analyze data, (2) create descriptions, (3) create scenarios, and (4) share and adjust.
Collect and analyze data
Collect data using qualitative and/or quantitative research methods and analyze it to learn about your users. Look for data and patterns that help you answer questions like:
Who are the users?
How many are there?
How do they interact with the system/product/service?
Next, form a hypothesis by asking “what are the differences among users?”. Group similar characteristics together, then identify, and name each group.
Create persona descriptions
Establish the number of personas you are going to have for your product or service. Remember that although you will typically have multiple personas for a single product/service, the team will want to focus on one persona at a time.
Describe each persona:
Include details about the persona’s needs, area of work, work conditions, work strategies and goals, etc
Include a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character
Give each persona a name
Create scenarios
Although this is not necessarily part of creating the actual personas themselves, the main purpose of a persona is to help guide the team through various phases of the UX Process and creating scenarios will help with problem analysis and idea development.
Create scenarios for your persona that feature them in the role of a user. Scenarios usually start by placing the persona in a specific context with a problem they want to or have to solve.
Share and adjust
Personas are most powerful when they are shared with everyone that has stake in your project. This will help anchor design and ideation discussions within the development team and prioritize and guide discussions with stakeholders during sprint reviews.
Decide how you want to share your personas with the organization, focusing on these three groups:
Development team
Project stakeholders
Users
Remember that personas are dynamic so you should revise the descriptions whenever you discover new information. It is possible that personas become stale and outdated. In most cases you can probably rewrite the existing descriptions, but sometimes you will need to delete entire personas and create new ones.
When you are ready to build your personas, you can use the Persona Template developed specifically for Marine and Civil Aviation.
Template
You can find example personas and a template you can use to start making your own personas, check out the MAACE Persona Template.
Best practices
Keep personas dynamic
Personas can become stale and irrelevant if they are outdated and aren’t representative of the current organizational landscape or user landscape. Personas should be stable enough so that they are memorable, but flexible enough that they can be updated when things change.
Be conscious of format and location
When creating personas, be mindful of the format they are in and where they are stored. Personas should be kept in a location where they can be shared and referenced easily, such as a team directory/folder or wiki.
Because personas are meant to be flexible, consider the format. If you print large posters to put in your team room, they are less susceptible to change because of the effort and cost involved in printing new posters. Similarly, a PDF feels more final and will deter folks from making suggestions and/or edits, whereas a slide deck or Google doc invites collaboration and makes editing easy.
They don’t need to be pretty
The most effective personas are often not visual works of art. Sometimes you might benefit from putting some effort into the visual design if personas are new to the organization and you are trying to get executive stakeholder buy-in. But for most cases, don’t overinvest in visual design. Not all teams have visual design expertise on them, but that should not prevent you from creating great personas. The content, discoverability, and format are more important.
Things to avoid
Personas are fictitious embodiments of patterns and themes you find in the research and do not describe real people. This means that you can’t create a persona based on one specific person.
Do not include any sensitive or private information in a persona, such as participants' real names or address information.
Be aware of your unconscious biases so that they don’t influence how you create personas.
Resources
Nielsen Norman Group: Personas are Living Documents
Nielsen Norman Group: Personas 101
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