How To Create Personas?
Creating Personas help ensure your engagement findings are actionable and memorable. Each Persona should be accompanied by questions to prompt thoughtful critique of design so you can make sure that the needs and perspectives of diverse stakeholders are being represented.
Go out and talk to people who are impacted by the problem you are trying to solve. Some ways you might gather data include Interviews, workshops, electronic or paper surveys or through observations. People are often really bad at reporting what they do. Observing their interaction with a product or service gives us a more accurate look at what people really do vs what they say.
Draw out 6–10 human head shapes depending on the amount of data you have and project timeline considerations
Look at the quotes, needs, and insights you’ve collected through interviews, workshops, or other forms of engagement. Write them on sticky notes
Things to consider:
What stands out? What concise quote represents a particular theme? What is something someone said in an interview that was a punch to the gut? Who’s an outlier? Who’s the norm? Who needs the most help? Who’s someone who can offer the most help? What are the major issues that need more highlighting?Place one quote, need, or insight sticky note within each of the head shapes and repeat until you feel that you’ve fairly (not necessarily exhaustively) represented a set of Personas.
Next, go through each Persona one by one and apply 8–20 insight sticky notes from the research that you have analyzed. Remember you’re creating fictionalized Personas grounded in our research. You should complete this step very quickly. No single Persona should match exactly an individual you’ve engaged with, but collectively, the Personas as a group should represent the range of experiences you’ve learned about in your research.
You can then type up your Personas or present them in a way that can support empathy and storytelling as you move forward. Alongside the story you tell, give the Persona a name and refine the image you started with so it matches the fictional life you’ve created for the person - sketch the person or find an image online.