3. Contents
§ What are personas?
§ Different types of persona
§ What we’ve learnt
§ Common challenges of using personas
§ How you can overcome some of these challenges
§ Q&A (30 minutes)
from
4. What are personas?
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§ A representation of a customer or
user that can be used within an
organization when the customer is
not present
§ Their power lies in their ability to
help you develop empathy for
them, so you can build products
and services that meet their
needs and solve their problems
8. Proto-personas
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§ The result of secondary research and
educated guesses
§ Not validated with user data
§ Good starting point before doing
further research
9. What we’ve learnt
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§ Teams typically use organization
wide personas
§ Personas tend to be developed by a
central function or an external party
§ Most personas take the shape of
marketing personas
10. Common challenges of
using personas
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1. Using the wrong type of persona
2. Personas not built around a specific problem
3. Personas built based on no data
4. Personas that never change
5. Outsourcing
6. Personas that are too similar
11. Using the wrong type
of persona
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§ Anchoring decisions on data that
is not relevant
§ Creates confusion within teams
and stakeholders, impacting
communication and decision-
making
12. Personas not built around
a specific problem
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§ Having a scope that’s too wide tends
to generate unfocused solutions
§ You should understand the context,
and then narrow the scope
13. Personas based
on no data
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§ If there’s no proof, then it’s an
assumption
§ Different people with different
opinions and with no supporting
data… how do you make decisions?
15. Outsourcing
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§ To build products that users love,
empathy is key
§ If it’s your user, or your customer,
then you need to own it!
16. Personas that are
too similar
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§ People use products and services in
different ways and have different
problems to solve
§ If personas are too similar, are you
addressing a single need? Or are
you ignoring part of your market?
17. Overcoming some of
these challenges
from
§ Tips
- Identify the problem that needs to be solved
- Observe and interview customers/users to get a better
understanding of the problem
- Develop personas that accurately represent your
customers/users
- Refine the personas with your team, based on the insights from
your research
- Ensure your personas are dynamic and change if you collect
new insights
18. Identify the problem
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§ The identified problem is generally based
on limited data and assumptions
§ The first step is to collect the information
that you already have, as a starting point.
§ What is the problem, or the
manifestation of the problem, and who
can you talk to if you need to learn
more?
19. Observe & Interview
from
§ Learn from behaviors and attitudes of your
users
§ Take the time to observe your users
§ Interview your users to generate more
insights
20. Develop personas
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§ Condense your insights
§ ~8-10 people presenting similar
behaviors and attitudes could
represent a persona
§ Focus your personas on a specific
problem
21. Refine personas
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§ As you develop and test your
solutions, you will keep generating
more insights
§ Those insights should serve as
fodder to update your personas
22. Make them dynamic
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§ Be aware of context
§ Question how changes may impact
your users
§ Update your personas to reflect this
