Persona Building

Type				Team Size
Collaborative Tools	Software	Personal Skills	Productivity Tools	1	2-10	11-30	30+

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What, Why & When

Persona Building is a tool that helps better understand the target group when designing a product or service. In Persona Building, a specific fictional user is imagined with his or her experiences, needs and characteristics, and the prospective product or service can be developed more specifically for this persona. This is mostly done in business, but can also be helpful for any design process that aims to fulfill the needs of a specific audience (see Design Thinking)

Goal(s)

• Understand your target audience's needs and wishes.
• Facilitate and speed up design and decision-making processes.
• Make the outcome more user-focused and distinct.

Getting started

Persona Building starts with the gathering of data about the target groups. This can be data that already exists, such as large-scale surveys, information on potential user groups such as the SINUS milieus, or observations made in terms of the audiences of comparable products and services. It can also emerge from knowledge and experiences within the team, or be original data gathered for the specific design purpose, if the resources are available for that.

Based on this data, overlappings and trends are identified about the targeted audience. The persona that is then built should represent these identified elements. Importantly, a persona should not become a prototypical or stereotypical puppet. A persona is not the sum of survey data or a demographic group. Instead, one should attempt to imagine a potentially real person with flaws, contradictions and different facets. No more than a handful (three to four) personas (if more than one at all) should be built at once in order to maintain a sharp idea.

Each created persona should possibly include a drawing or picture of the imagined person and his or her name. This way, the persona becomes more vivid and recognizable within the project. Further, the persona should be described in terms of his or her characteristics: his or her background, hobbies and job, lifestyle, family situation, needs, problems, preferences and desires. This helps understand how and why the person would be interested in the to-be-designed product or service, and how it can be adapted and improved to better fit the persona's circumstances. The designers should try to understand their offer from the persona's perspective.

Last, the persona should be implemented into the design process. From this point on, all team members should know about the persona and speak in terms of his or her specific needs and actions instead of speaking about broad needs of a potential target audience. The persona can be thrown into imagined scenarios and situations to understand how he or she would react. This way, the design process becomes more user-focused.

Example

Let us develop an example. Imagine you are attempting to develop a solution for smart mobility in the city. You do know what the general service should be, but you are unsure of the specificities.

Links & Further reading

References

• UX Planet. How to create Personas, a step by step guide.
• Medium. Your guide to successful persona building.
• UXPRESSIA. How to Create a Persona in 7 Steps - A Guide with Examples.

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