Crafting personas to understand your users

[AJ Siegel]

Overview

User personas are a fictional representation of a user your solution might serve. A solution may have one or more personas based on the audience it solves a problem for.

Each persona is documented in a way that represents the goals and characteristics of your user(s).  Each persona focuses on the character’s goals and pain points while also include data about their behaviors, skills and attitudes that may affect the solution

 

Outcomes

Some of the outcomes you will achieve by doing this is

• Shared understanding of users’ needs, behaviors and goals.
• Insights into how to design for your users
• Reveal the underlying “why” behind users’ actions, choices, and decisions
• Shift perspectives into recognizing that different people have different needs, and expectations

 

Participants

6-12 stakeholders that have deep understanding of users and the business process. 

Materials & environment

• Post-its, Sharpies
• Butcher wall paper
• Online collaboration tool like Miro or large conference room
• Teammates and Moderator

Before you start

1. Gather any existing information about your target audience that might influence how your participants segment them.
2. Set up your online collaboration space, or in person conference room

Method Steps

1. Present any existing research and data you have on your users. All workshop participants should take notes on any patterns they hear in the research presented.
2. Individually, participants will write down all the roles expected to interact with this solution. Consider the notes taken in step #1 and any other insights you have. (3 minutes)
3. Each participant will read their sticky notes alound. Hand them to the facilitator to organize on a white board
4. Participants will use voting dots (6) to identify the most important roles to this solution. They can vote multiple times on the same role.
5. Break out into groups of 3-4 participants.
6. Each group should select 1 of the top voted roles and identify 1 or more personas that represent that role
7. As a group, complete an Empathy Map for each of the personas (10 minutes)
8. Each group will present the maps they created and the facilitator will organize them on the whiteboard
9. Create new groups of 3-4 people. One way to do this is to have 1 person from each group rotate over to a different group. If you have 4 person groups, repeat this one more time.
10. From the whiteboard, select a role and the related set of empathy maps and try to complete a persona template for each persona (20 minutes)
11. Present the personas back to the room.

Resources

• Empathy Map Template
• Persona Template
• Persona Workshop on Now Create
• How to choose the scope of your personas (external)
• What Are Personas and Why Should I Care? (external)
• Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members (external)