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https://www.alexandercowan.com/tutorial-personas-problem-scenarios-user-stories/

Creating Personas

What is a persona?

Personas are humanized descriptions of customers and users. They’re standard tools in practices like design thinking and Lean Startup, and for good reason: they’re highly useful for just about anything that has to do with making stuff or selling stuff.

They generally have at least four elements:

1. A Name They have a name- I like the convention ‘[first name] the [role]’, so ‘Andrea the Auditor’ or ‘Dave the Dispatcher’.

2. A Screener Always start with a screening question you can use to identify subjects- even if you’re not about to interview any, it would help make sure your persona is adequately specific. For example, in the case of ‘Andrea the Auditor’ the screener might be ‘How many accounting audits have you completed in the last three months?’.

3. A Description This general description introduces the persona and answers questions like ‘Who are they?’ and ‘What makes them tick?’. The ‘Day in the Life’ tool is a good way to step through this.

4. A Perspective As touchy-feely as they may seem, personas are a design tool, which means their main purpose is to help you do some job (or several jobs) better. I like the use the popular ‘Think

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See Feel Do’ points to help refine and focus the perspective we suppose the persona has in a way that’s more operational.

The balance of this article is about helping you understand how to create such personas and to use them effectively in your projects.

How do I get started?

If you’re dying to get started, here’s a personas template in Google Doc’s- you can copy it to your Google account (File >> Make a Copy) or download it as a Microsoft Word file (File >> Download As). If you want more ideas on how to better create and use personas, come on back anytime.

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What isn’t a persona?

In college marketing classes and/or watching 80’s movies (I’ve done both so I’m a major expert), we learn that the way you describe a market is something like ‘males 25-35 with incomes over $30,000/year’. But who is that guy/gal? How would you figure out what innovative new product or feature he or she might like? The reality is that those profiles aren’t very discussable, actionable or testable. They perpetuate useless arguments inside conference rooms and encourage bland products and bland marketing that nobody particularly likes.

In the design world, we make observations about the individual and then look at how we can expand those into creative solutions. Personas are how much of that observation and insight is encapsulated to make it vivid, testable, and durable for work you do weeks, months, or years after you create the persona.

(Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean personas are the opposite of data. I teach at UVA Darden and some of this most exciting work we’re doing is on helping students synthesize better insights using both the ‘small data’ of personas and the big data that’s amenable to machine intelligence. As any practicing scientist will tell you, the best way to get a useful experimental result is to go in with a strong hypothesis. Personas are a way of developing better hypotheses.)

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When do you create a persona?

I advise having relevant personas on hand at the beginning of any project. If you don’t have them, block off 30-60 minutes and draft a few as a first step. Good design is about focus, and if you don’t know who you’re building for (or promoting to) it’s impossible to achieve.

In the Venture Design process, personas are the first item. The reason for this is that they’re the basis for deciding what problems (jobs) are important, finding subjects to test your assumptions, and drafting user user stories for development, among other things.

How do you create a persona?

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The most important thing is just to put pen to paper and get started. Don’t overthink it, but do be ready to revise it. That said, here is a view on the way I recommend teams generally approach the use of personas:

As I mentioned, I like to start by drafting from what I know (step 02). There’s a perspective that you should do interviews first to avoid biasing your perspective, but what I find is that: a) if teams don’t draft, they don’t really know what they want to learn when they interview subjects and b) if you’re not ready to revise your draft, you’re probably not going to end up with highly useful personas anyway.

After drafting, you’ll probably have a strong sense of all the things you don’t actually know about this persona and/or suspect you know but haven’t actually observed. This is a great time to continue the process and move to drafting your interview guide (step 03). We’ll step through this in more detail in the section ‘Talking to Customers’, but basically this is a progression of open-ended questions you’ll use when you’re talking to subjects that map to your persona(s). From there, you go talk to subjects (step 05) and iterate on your draft.

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There is also the question of whether you want to do Day in the Life. You’ll probably want to decide this in advance since it requires getting photos from your subjects (as always, be sure to get appropriate releases/permissions).

Drafting Personas

What’s a good persona?

Good personas tell a story. If you watch interviews with innovators like Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square), you’ll often hear them talk about how they’ve learned to be better storytellers. This isn’t to discount the importance of being rigorous and quantitive- it’s to anchor that rigor in a

meaningful starting point and identify the right tools for that starting point.

Avoid bullet points. The ‘plastic persona’ you see is the opposite of what you want. The photo is clipart from the Internet. The description is a set of generic bullet points

and they don’t say much of anything about who this person really is or what they want. Get real photos. Create a collage of real stuff. If you’re saying that your target persona Tweets or posts certain types of content online, get examples. If you’re saying that they hate doing paperwork, get samples of the kind of paperwork they have to do. Write full sentences that deliver a narrative.

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Speaking of pictures, include them, and make sure they’re real, actual people from in the target

persona group.

The ‘organic persona’ is a better start. There’s an actual paragraph of description, and that the photo was taken with an iPhone out in the field, which is where you should be when you’re developing personas. I personally like to give all the personas a first name- ‘Mary the Mom’; ‘Andrew the Accountant’. One of the top failure modes of persona creation is that they have their humanity peeled away or just never acquire it. Giving them a name is a trick that helps humanize them.

How do I get started?

If you’re having trouble putting pen to paper, think through a day in this persona’s life. What’s the first thing (in your area) they think about after they wake up in the morning? What about before they go to bed? What happens in between? What motivates them? Demotivates them?

All that said- less is more. If this is your first draft, your job is to think about what you know and what you don’t know to focus and motivate you when you go out and talk to a real subjects (customers, users, etc.). Oh- and photos. Find a photo or set of photos you can use. That will really help you keep the persona human.

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Below is an example from ‘HVAC in a Hurry’, a fictional company I use in my Coursera course. HVAC standard for heating, ventilation, and air conditioning and that’s what the company does: maintains and repairs HVAC’s for businesses. They’re building an app for the field technicians. Here’s the first paragraph the persona ‘Trent the Technician’ (for the full persona, see Reference B):

EXCERPT FROM

PERSONA

Trent’s been an HVAC technician for 7 years; 4 years of that at HinH. After a couple of years off, Trent enrolled in a 2 year program on the advice of a close friend who was doing the same. Getting his first job wasn’t as easy as everyone said- and the money was terrible. But now he’s a senior technician at HinH and the money’s pretty good.

FULL PERSONA

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How do I make sure my persona is good?

In classes and workshops, I get the questions a lot: ‘How do I know when I’m done? In good shape?”. The long answer is that with a tool like personas, it’s always a work in progress. The short version is that there are a few things you can quickly validate to help make sure you’re on track.

To that end, inspired by Bill Wake’s INVEST acronym for thinking about user stories, I offer you the REACT checklist:

SEE REACT CHECKLIST

How do I draft personas?

On specific steps, there are many paths to arrive at quality personas. Here are the general steps I use with students and advisees:

See STEPS

These are the steps for drafting. Following the drafting, you’ll move on to the hugely important task of actually interviewing real subjects and using that insight to revise your personas. We’ll get to that shortly. Next, we’ll step through a popular framework for making sure your personas will be useful for driving action in your particular are

REACT CHECKLIST

STEPS

STEPS