Crafting a Persona

A guide to crafting great personas

A design persona is a detailed description of the person that you are designing for. Personas are a powerful communication tool that you can share and reference throughout the product lifecycle to promote a user-centered approach to your product.

USE THIS PLAY TO ...

• Visually communicate your research findings in a easily digestible manner

• Build empathy toward your users and continuously advocate for their needs

• Break up an amorphous user base into manageable, well defined, targets

Running this play

Research is a team sport. While you can create a persona on your own, involving your team throughout the process will yield much better results.

Recommended Tools

• Markers

• Whiteboard

• Realtimeboard

Step 1 - Create a Provisional Persona

Creating provisional personas will help surface the competing theories your team has about who you will be designing for.

Provisional personas are non-research-based personas; they are also referred to as assumptive, ad-hoc or proto-personas.

1. Gather your team, grab some markers and a whiteboard

2. Draw a large rectangle and divide it into these four sections:

   • Name

   • Demographics

   • Problems

   • Solutions

3. Give your persona a name

4. Brainstorm and list your assumptions about your persona's:

   • Demographic information (e.g. age, occupation, income, etc.)

   • Relevant problems

   • Potential solutions for the product

5. Repeat steps 2–4 until you get a handful of personas that are representative of your team's core persona assumptions

Provisional Persona

A provisional persona is not an end in itself. Provisional personas are only a short stop on the way to creating useful, research backed personas. By creating a provisional persona you'll get your assumptions out of your team's head and give counter-intuitive interview insights greater contrast.

Step 2 - Interview

Provisional personas are meant to be just that, provisional. To evolve your provisional personas into useful personas you'll need to interview real people. To ensure that your interviews generate the type of data that you'll need to create useful personas, your questions will have to touch on some key themes and uncover some scenarios.

Useful personas are predicated on great interviews with real people. To learn more about running and analyzing great in-depth interviews check out our primer.

Key Themes

Role

Your personas should detail what role your users play. Keep in mind that people wear many hats in their lives. Avoid inferring roles strictly from work titles or traditional gender roles and focus on the role and responsibilities your interviewees have in context.

Sample Interview Questions

Describe your current role and responsibilities

What is a typical day like for you?

What do you enjoy most about what you do?

Goals

Your personas should detail what goals your users have. Goals are the outcomes that your users are ultimately trying to achieve when using your product.

Sample Interview Questions

What were you hoping to achieve?

Why is [goal] important important to you?

What other steps are you taking to achieve [goal]?

Behaviours

Your personas should detail the behaviours and habits of your users. Unfortunately, what people say they do and what people actually do can be drastically different. To address this, encourage detailed storytelling from your interviewees. Look for any inconsistencies or patterns in how interviewees behaves from story to story and drill down to better understand core behaviour patterns.

Sample Interview Questions

Tell me story about the last time you [ task ]?

You mentioned you [ behaviour ], tell me more about that

Skills

Your personas should detail how skilled your users are. Skills include their level of expertise in their role, as well as their level of digital literacy. For example, a veteran lawyer may be highly knowledgeable about court proceedings but a novice in digital technology.

Sample Interview Questions

Discuss your experience level as a [ role ] ?

What sources of information do you typically consult prior to performing [ task ] ?

How-To Screening for Low Digital Skills

Context

Useful personas should include relevant facts about the context in which your users operate. Interviewees may not have internet access in certain situations, or might not feel comfortable using their smartphones in business meetings.

Sample Interview Questions

Describe your surroundings when you are trying to [ goal ]

Is there anything about being [ context ] that makes [ goal ] time consuming or slow?

Relationships

Useful personas should outline relationships that are relevant to your interviewee's experience with the product. Interviews can sometimes reveal that relationship dynamics have a significant effect on how people interact with your product.

Sample Interview Questions

Was anyone else there with you when you were trying to [ goal ]?

Was anyone else involved in your decisions to purchase [ product ]?

Survey Studies Pew Research Center for Internet and Technology

A persona is focused more on behaviour patterns than demographic ones. However, demographics are relevant when they affect behaviour patterns. At times, there is a strong relationship between demographics and actions (There aren't many teenage surgeons with two kids and a Linux computer purchasing cloud services out there). To avoid stereotyping, your persona should only surface relevant demographic information and it should be anchored in real interviews and data.

Scenarios

Personas without scenarios are like characters with no plot. — Kim Goodwin

Scenarios are the sequence of events that transpired when one of your interviewees tried to meet a certain goal. Because they factor in the unpredictableness of real life, scenarios can be one of the most enduring and useful outcomes of exploratory interviews. Running your solutions through scenarios can help you test the resilience of your design solutions.

Scenarios are not the same as user stories, use cases or job stories. Furthermore, the definition of these terms tends to vary across the industry and evolve over time. With this in mind, we've put together a handy guide for these terms:

Scenario

Example Today, Taré is flying on two flights with a tight connection through Charlotte airport. Taré has taken this trip dozens of times before.

Like usual, it takes Taré more than an hour to get from home to the departure airport. The first leg of Taré’s journey is a 90-minute flight. The second leg, leaving Charlotte, is a 3-hour flight. After the two flights, Taré will have to drive for another hour before reaching the hotel. Today, the entire journey, from leaving home to reaching the hotel, will take Taré upwards of 7 hours.

Because the connection in Charlotte is very short, Taré will have to hurry to make the connection. There’s no time to stop for any food, especially if the incoming flight is the least bit delayed (which it often is).

That means Taré will have to bring any food from home. Taré prefers not to check bags and the amount of carry-on space for extra food is limited. Taré is worried about bringing the food through security. The second leg has in-flight meals, but they don’t match Taré’s dietary preferences. On many previous trips like this, Taré went without eating the entire time, which is stressful and uncomfortable.

User Stories

A user story is a short description of something that your customer will do when they come to your website or use your application/software, focused on the value or result they get from doing this thing.

Example As a Flickr member, I want to set different privacy levels on my photos, so I can control who sees which of my photos.

Use Cases

A use case is a description of a set of interactions between a system and and one or more actors (where ‘actor’ can be people, or other systems: for example, both online shoppers and PayPal can be actors). They are usually created as documents.

Example Requirements 101: User Stories vs. Use Cases

Job Story

A job story frames problems as a "Job", focusing on the triggering event or situation, the motivation and goal, and the intended outcome of the design problem. The concept is a derivative of Jobs-to-Done theory.

When [ Situation ] , I want to [ Motivation ] , so I can [ Goal ] .

For example: When an important new customer signs up, I want to be notified, so I can start a conversation with them.

Step 3 - Create an Artifact

At this point, you've got all of the necessary ingredients to put together some great personas. Personas are typically shared in the form of a design artifact.

Persona Design Artifact for a Social Impact Startup

To make your design artifact, take your insights from step 2, put them on stickies and group the stickies that belong together in clusters (we recommend using Realtimeboard's virtual stickies). Keep doing this until you've created a handful of behaviorally consistent personas. Then, as a group, decide on which two personas to focus on. If achieving this is contentious for your team we recommend using the KJ Technique.

An example of a cluster of similar behaviours

Quotes

Adding verbatim quotes to your artifact is a great way to succinctly illustrate how your persona thinks. The most powerful quotes are those that explain why your persona behaves they way it does. If your research challenges some strongly held beliefs, consider using video snippets that highlight key quotes. Watching people react to questions and prototypes is a good way to activate people's mirror neurons and help them understand the actions of your users.

Beware of cherry picking quotes that reinforce your own personal belief about the product. Quotes can be harmful to the process when they lead your audience to believe that a certain sentiment was common when in fact it was just one person's opinion.

Pictures

Using a realistic stock photo in persona artifacts has been standard practice in the software industry for decades. It's generally argued that putting a face to your persona increases empathy. Recently, there has been some pushback against the idea of using pictures as they can lend themselves to unconscious stereotyping. If you share these concerns, here are some alternatives: Using multiple pictures to illustrate the cloud of people the persona represents, illustrating a cartoon persona or using iconography.

Persona Cloud

Step 4 - Share

If It Doesn’t Get Scheduled, It Will Never Get Done

You'll know you've created a successful research-based persona when your product team begins to incorporate the persona into their way of thinking. Achieving this is not easy. One approach is to make "reviewing personas" part of your team rituals. You can do this by adding it to the agendas of team meetings.

• Review Personas ( 10 min)

  • Recap of our personas ( 3 min)

  • Discuss current progress in relations to personas ( 5 min)

  • Vote on whether changes to the roadmap need to be made (2 min)

Team meetings that can benefit from having a persona review include, but are not limited to:

• Design Critiques

• Client Presentations

• Ideation Sessions

• Feature Prioritization

Sources

Jenson, S. (2002). The simplicity shift: Innovative design tactics in a corporate world. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Hall, E., & Zeldman, J. (2013). Just enough research. New York: A Book Apart.
Sharon, T., & Gadbaw, B. (2016). Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean User Research. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media.