WHO IS THIS DOCUMENT FOR?

Business Stakeholders, Product Owners, Designers

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Overview
• Better products with personas
• Effective personas
• Crafting personas
• Personas as part of the team
• Example persona
• Resources & additional information

Overview

Personas are fictional people with names, pictures, demographics, and other useful information based on thorough user research. Personas provide a way to communicate realistic and reliable representations of your key audience(s) to your teams. They serve as reference tools that can be used to design and improve products and solutions in a way that keeps the needs of your customers in mind. In other words, personas help your team focus on what’s important to your users.

Personas single out idealized individuals who represent major market segments. In doing so, they enable designers, engineers, and other stakeholders to focus on the specific needs of their most important users by helping them think through how these users might make decisions and respond to situations. Because it’s often impossible to bring real users into design discussions, personas provide a way to give users “a seat at the table.”

Personas include relevant information that relate to your app, product, website, or service. All of the information included in a persona should directly relate to the project. Common features of personas include:

• Name
• Job title
• Audience segment (e.g., teacher, doctor, business leader)
• Descriptive summary/main points
• Responsibilities
• Demographics (age, education, ethnicity, marital/family status)
• Physical, social, and technological environment
• Goals and common tasks
• Challenges/pain points
• Key phrases or quotes

For any project, limiting the number of personas to three or four helps the team focus on the most important audiences for your product or service.

It is also important to limit the amount of information you include in your personas: personas should be concise, useful, and meaningful. There is no “checklist” to complete when you’re making personas – you should add only the information you need to think through your project as a user.

Better products with personas

Personas provide an effective way to “hone in” on the most important aspects of your audience by linking those aspects, trends, and tendencies to individuals. Personas enable designers, engineers, business leaders, and other stakeholders to make more informed, user-focused decisions based upon real data and relevant user concerns. Personas help “personalize” otherwise abstract customer data – it is much easier to think of a person than a set of data about a market segment.

For designers and engineers, this means that they can focus on the particular needs and challenges unique to various key market segments. Lending credibility to the old saying, “constraints breed creativity,” personas force the products and/or services to be uniquely tailored to the key identified communities.

Similarly, personas help stakeholders and other business leaders to be more strategic about how they want to position their products and services to ensure that their efforts are truly relevant and beneficial to the market segments they serve.

Well-employed personas lead to better usability for products by guiding and encouraging design discussions to be customer-centric.

Effective personas

Effective personas are based on qualitative and quantitative user research and analytics. Your personas will only ever be as effective as the research that goes into them. Good personas:

• Serve as realistic and reliable representations of a major slice of your audience
• Identify and focus on your audience’s key goals, tasks, and challenges
• Give an understanding of the audience’s perspective(s)
• Help identify commonalities within user groups

Ultimately, personas serve as another tool that can be leveraged in the design/refinement process, which means that there are more and less appropriate times for their use. Personas end up being most effective when there is a clearly defined audience for the product or service and when there is a good body of research to base them on.

Personas can be effective tools because, according to Shlomo Goltz, they “leverage and stimulate several innate human abilities:”

Narrative practice:
This is the ability to create, share and hear stories.

Long-term memory:
This is the ability to acquire and maintain memories of the past (wisdom) from our own life experiences, which can be brought to bear on problems that other people face.

Concrete thinking:
This is the tendency for people to better relate to and remember tangible examples, rather than abstractions.

Theory of mind (folk psychology):
This is the ability to predict another person’s behavior by understanding their mental state.

Empathy:
This is the ability to understand, relate to and even share the feelings of other specific people.

Experience-taking:
This is the ability to have the “emotions, thoughts, beliefs and internal responses” of a fictional character when reading or watching a story.

Source: “A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (Part 1)” by Shlomo Goltz

Clear, concise, and thorough personas help designers, engineers, and other stakeholders keep in mind the different backgrounds, needs, expectations, and challenges their audience bring to bear on some aspect of their product or service.

Leveraging these “human abilities” enables designers and other stakeholders to make impactful decisions by better relating to their users, leading ultimately to better designed products and services.

Crafting personas

Personas are most useful when as many people as possible or practical are involved in the creation process. This not only provides value by adding other opinions, perspectives, and concerns to the process (for example, a designer and an engineer may want different kinds of information out of a persona), but it also provides valuable buy-in from team members.

The major steps for creating personas are:

1. List your major audiences
2. Research and gather information about those audiences, including real user feedback if possible
3. Group research into a few representative categories (these will become the different “personas”)
4. Come up with questions, tasks, and stories related to those different categories
5. Identify their goals, tasks, and pain points
6. Collect all the information into clear, concise “finished” personas to be kept in the team area

“Finished” in step six is in quotes because a persona is never really finished; personas should be periodically updated and reconsidered as new information about your key audiences is discovered. In doing so, the personas remain fresh, accurate, and valuable members of the team.

Personas as part of the team

When personas are created by the team within an organization that's going to use them, they provide an additional benefit of forcing the team to "sit down" with their users and actively empathize with their needs, challenges, and situations, ultimately creating better products and services as a result.

Personas become useful members of the team when they come up during discussions and influence decisions about your product or service. They provide a common vocabulary that can be used as short-hand to describe the concerns, tendencies, and needs of your key audiences. When making decisions about features, improvements, or new directions, personas help inform the priority of work to be done.

For example, if you were creating a website and one of your personas has difficulty with her eyesight, designing a site with clean visual organization and the option for larger font-sizes becomes a priority.

Once you’ve created your personas, you put them into imagined “scenarios” revolving around your product or service to understand the decisions they would make and the actions they’d take to reach a goal.

Example persona

This is an example of a persona an insurance company might create for a segment of potential customers likely to secure a policy through the Affordable Care Act.

Jennifer L.

• Freelance Blogger and Magazine Contributor
• 26 Years Old
• Single
• B.A. in Communications

Jennifer recently turned 26 and lost coverage under her parents' plan and is looking for an individual plan during her Special Enrollment Period. As a freelance contributor, she does not receive healthcare through her various employers. She prefers to get things set up and then not worry about them.

TECHNOLOGIES

Android, Apple, Chrome, Microsoft Office, WordPress, Twitter

SKILL CHARACTERISTICS

• Technically savvy
• Infrequently requires doctor's visits
• Comfortable performing tasks online (commerce, shopping, etc.)

GOALS & TASKS

Jennifer spends much of her time working and playing on the computer. She prefers to do as much "life work" (banking, shopping, etc.) online as possible, including scheduling doctor's visits and filling prescriptions.

CHALLENGES

Finding the information she needs. Jennifer gets frustrated quickly with jargon and when the information she is looking for is hard to find.

Resources & additional information

• Personas article on usability.gov
• A Closer Look at Personas
• Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members
• An Introduction to Personas and How to Create Them
  
  

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Last Reviewed/Updated: March 2018