Why Use Personas?
Personas provide a better and more personal way to understand your problem. One way to better understand your problem and to come up with less-than-obvious solutions, is to consider the problem from other vantage points. Oftentimes people make assumptions about the people they are trying to help or the stakeholders they are engaging may face barriers that make it difficult for them to have an equal voice at the table. Personas help you empathize with the individuals you may interact with during the engagement process and that you are designing for. They allow you to ensure that a person’s voice is heard even though they are not physically in a meeting.
Whether you are developing strategies or solutions, consulting Personas as you go is a quick way to check that the needs and perspectives of diverse stakeholders are being represented. Using Personas will help you generate more diverse ideas. Everyone has different lived experiences that are dictated by cultural and socioeconomic status. It can be hard to step outside of your own lived experience to imagine solutions to problems faced by people who are different from you.
Think of a problem. Now think of a solution. Do you think that someone who is vastly different from you would come up with the exact same solution? Maybe, but probably not. Everyone uses their own lived experiences to design solutions to the problems they face. Using Personas helps you examine problems using different lenses and perspectives so you can design ideas that take people’s rich differences into consideration.
Whenever you’re faced with a challenge or hard decision, pull out the Personas and review the situation from each Persona’s perspective. Personas allow you to imagine how different stakeholders would experience your design and how they might provide constructive criticism or changes.