Personas

Purpose & Objectives

Why are you doing this? What are you aiming for?

Personas are used for the purpose of identifying stereotypical categories of users within a given service or platform. This is used to establish typical user behaviours and typical tools.

Personas can be used to inspire the identification of our target user group and for creation of scenarios.

Data Sources

Where do you find the knowledge or input needed to do it?

The information employed to create a persona is generally obtained through the earlier step of contextual inquiry and focus groups. More concretely, the researcher can use transcripts to draw direct quotes from.

The personas are fictional and included information is up to the discretion of the researcher.

Procedure

How do you do it? Which techniques or tools do you use?

Starting from the interview/observation, the team handpicks a number of quotes, snippets or facts that feel relevant and representative concerning the interviewees. After that, the snippets can be organized in a chart by theme, and finally through the process of insight-making, all the convergent point of views are clustered together to build cohesive characters.

To frame the character, personal attributes, specific characteristics and information about their lifestyle are added. It can be helpful to include pictures or sketches to visualize typical users.

Outcomes / Results

What do you get once you have done it?

Many kinds of personas can be developed:

• primary personas = the main users of the service
• secondary personas = users that don’t reply to all the main characteristics
• non-personas = profiles of users for whom the service is definetely not thought for

In total, four to six personas are developed in order to represent different types of typical users for our target user group. This information helps to better understand what users require and find solutions that tailor to their needs. It can be also be used to form a cohesive understanding among the research group.