Personas

What is this technique about

Personas are created to recognise the needs and expectations of the users/customers. Personas are composed of actual data collected from multiple individuals, and they may not describe real people. It makes the design task less complex as it can guide the ideation process and helps in achieving the goal of creating a good user experience for the target group.

Personas are typically used in four different perspectives based on the objectives to be attained:

1. 1. Goal-directed personas – The objective of a goal-directed persona is to examine the process and workflow that a user would utilise to achieve their goals while using a specific product/service.
   2. Role-based personas – They focus on a user’s role in the organisation and help generate insights for better product design decisions.
   3. Engaging personas – They incorporate both goal and role based personas. To quote Lene Nielsen, “The engaging perspective is rooted in the ability of stories to produce involvement and insight. Through an understanding of characters and stories, it is possible to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people. The purpose of the engaging perspective is to move from designers seeing the user as a stereotype with whom they are unable to identify and whose life they cannot envision, to designers actively involving themselves in the lives of the personas.”
   4. Fictional personas – Unlike the other personas, the design team creates a fictional persona from their experience and does not involve user research. They are useful during initial sketches but may be flawed as it depends entirely on the design team’s experience with interaction with users and not on user research.

Where does it come from 

Persona mapping was developed in the early 1990s for IT system development in its crude stage (variations such as user archetypes, user models, lifestyle snapshots, and model users). In 1999, in his book “The inmates are running the asylum”, Alan Cooper described how to use personas to describe fictitious users.

For which purposes it is used (why in your engineering teaching)

The technique helps create a user-centric or human-centric approach in designing as they align the designing team to an outside-in approach through collating research, trends, and data patterns as personas. Personas also add a human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in the research. Creating persona profiles helps understand the patterns in research, which synthesises the types of users for which the product/service is designed.

How to use it

Steps involved in creating a Persona

1. 1. Research and Analysis – The first step involved is the research and analysis. The most common approach is to observe and interview the users to learn about them and their needs. For collecting the required data for the analysis, different methods such as usage analytics, survey and focus groups or data collection through social media may be used.
   2. Persona descriptions – Create a persona description based on the data collected and analysed. A persona description may include the user’s education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, desires, attitudes, actions, etc. Giving Personas specific names and making it realistic to an actual user/customer is also essential during this step.
   3. Problem analysis – This step validates if the persona is within the context of a user group for which the product/service is developed for, or if the current design would meet the expectation of a user profile (persona).
   4. Collaboration and Iteration – Persona creation is an iterative process and requires multiple revisions based on the user research and definition of the target group.