TAO/Creating Personas and Working with Them/unit 1

Personas are hypothetical archetypes, or “stand-ins” for actual users or customers that drive the decision making for product or service design projects:

Personas are not real people, but they represent real people throughout the design process

Personas are not "made up"; they are discovered as a by-product of the investigative process into your users or costumers

Although personas are imaginary, they are defined with significant rigor and precision

Names and personal details for personas are made up to make them more realistic

Personas are defined by their needs and goals

For each product or service, more than one persona is usually created, but one or two personas should always be the primary focus for the design

You may draw your knowledge of the target group from various sources, including statistics. However, in order to be effective, you will usually need to gather a team of people who know these personas or to organize focus groups with members of the target group.

There are lots of ways to sketch out personas. You may want to adapt one of the example procedures to your purpose:

Example Procedure 1 (e.g. for designing e-inclusion measures for a particular fringe of the population):

Step 1: Who are they? - Describe their personal characteristics to give them a human touch, turn them into personalities (provide a photo)

Step 2: What are their behaviour and goals?

Step 3: What are barriers and obstacles regarding these goals?

Step 4: What are possible solutions to overcome these barriers and obstacles?

Step 5: What difficulties would you expect? Any further comments?

Example Procedure 2 (e.g. for designing support offers for professionals or volunteers in a particular function):

Step 1: What are their personal characteristics? - name, age, profession, further details from their life which could play a role regarding the situation under analysis

Step 2: What are their motivations and personal goals?

Step 3: What are their stakeholders? What are their stakeholders' expectations? (identify the expectations they are faced with in their function)

Step 4: What are critical events they could face? What challenges do they pose? (identify the challenges they would typically face in their function)

Step 5: What are possible support offers to help them living up to the expectations and mastering the challenges they face? (in terms of peer support, coaching, inter-vision, external support, etc.)

Example Procedure 3 (e.g. for internet marketing):

Step 1: Who are they, every day?

Step 2: What do they want, all the time?

Step 3: How do they interact with you and your competitors?

Step 4: What might make this interaction happen/not happen?

Step 5: How may they affect your organization?

Source: "Get In Your Customers' Heads: Creating Great Personas", Conversation Marketing, 2007. See also for more detailed instructions and an example.

Do you want to give your persona a face?

You may want to try http://www.pimptheface.com/ to create a phantom picture and upload it to Wikimedia Commons to integrate it in Wikiversity (Example).