A step-by-step guide to persona creation
The first thing most of us designers are taught is the concept of personas and the necessity of them when it comes to UX and product design. However, knowing is different from applying and it can be difficult to know where to begin when we’re asked to create these personas.
This step-by-step guide will take you through the process of persona creation, using a case study I recently concluded, and hopefully aid you in creating your personas.
The creation process outlined here is adapted from a 7-step guideline provided by Alan Cooper in his book About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design (2007). I highly recommend that you check out his book and especially his chapter on personas for a more detailed look at personas and persona creation.
Outline
- What are personas?
- Why are personas important?
- 3 steps to persona creation
What Are Personas?
Personas are user archetypes for a product or set of tools within a product. As archetypes, personas do not represent singular users but are representatives of a group of users that share similar behaviors, goals, and needs.
In most cases, personas are developed from the information gathered through interviews with users or target users. They consist of 1 to 2-page descriptions of behaviors, goals, frustrations, skills, and environment. There will usually be 2–5 personas for a product or set of tools within a product and one persona will typically be the primary focus of the designs.
Why Are Personas Important?
You can not design an effective product without a deep understanding of the user or the target audience. Personas help in building empathy and understanding of the users you’re designing for. This allows you to identify with users and be an advocate for them when making design decisions. This can help you to avoid unfocused designs or self-referential designs (designing for yourself) that can lead to loss of profit, customer/user confidence in your product and/or company, and possibly even injury or loss of life.
3 Steps to Persona Creation
- Collect & Organize Data/Information
- Identify Patterns
- Make it Complete
To describe the different steps of persona creation I am going to go through how I created personas for a case study I recently concluded. The case study was a design for a mobile and web application that would help personal fitness trainers keep track of their clients, manage their client’s needs, and run their business.
Step 1: Collect & Organize Data/Information
So this first step is really about learning and collecting information about your users through interviews.
1.1 Ad-Hoc Personas
However, when I did this step before I even started interviewing, I created ad-hoc personas (i.e., provisional personas), to quickly get an understanding of my users and to prepare my line of questioning for the interviews. You don’t have to do this in your projects but I did to get an understanding of the product domain.
The process I took to create the ad-hoc personas was I researched personal trainers and the type of users that use personal trainer apps. I looked through the reviews and comment sections of existing personal trainer apps to get a basic understanding of goals and frustrations based on what worked and didn’t work. I also perused personal trainer and fitness forums to form an understanding of the kind of people that would use a personal trainer app. After my research, I came up with the four groups of users I hypothesized would use the app: a virtual trainer, an in-person private trainer, an inexperienced client, an experienced client.
It is recommended that when creating ad-hoc personas you include images to start building that connection and empathy to your users. However, the images you select should be sketches or non-specific illustrations (if you’re not a great artist like me). Even though your ad-hoc personas are based on some research, they are not based on direct data gathered through interviews of the exact users of your product. Likewise, the description of your personas should not be very specific.
1.2 Interviews
To get trainers to interview I went to my local gym and spoke with a manager about interviewing some of his trainers. I didn’t go too much into detail about my project but I told him that I would be asking the trainers questions relating to their day-to-day process and how they interacted with clients in a digital medium. I was also referred to additional trainers from the trainers I interviewed at my local gym.
On the day of the interviews, I met the trainers at their respective gyms and was able to interview them in their environment. I would have liked to shadow them as they interacted with a few clients but due to privacy reasons, this was not possible. Ideally, for interviews, you want to conduct something that’s called an ethnographic interview where you interview the interviewee in the environment that they use the product in and shadow or spend the day watching them interact with the product in real-time.
The interviews were semi-structured, meaning that I did come with a preset list of questions, but I allowed the conversations to flow based on the responses and comments that the trainers made. I also made sure to record the conversations using recording software on my computer. Recording conversations allows you to go back and review the conversations for important information.
Immediately after the interviews, I jotted down any notes concerning attitudes, goals, or frustrations that were expressed by the interviewees. You want to do this immediately after since your observations are still fresh in your mind and they may not be captured during recordings. Also, all interviews should be transcribed, either the same day or a few days later, to make searching for quotes and information quicker and easier.
Step 2: Identify Patterns
After you’ve collected your information, the next steps involve using that information to create your personas. This first begins by identifying behavior patterns among your interviewees.
2.1 Behavior Variables
To identify these patterns, you want to meticulously go through your notes and transcripts and pull out any instances where the interviewee expresses a set of behavioral variables. Alan Cooper describes these variables as:
Activities — What the user does; frequency and volume
Attitudes — How the user thinks about the product domain and technology
Aptitudes — What education and training the user has; capability to learn
Motivations (i.e.; Goals) — Why the user is engaged in the product domain
Skills — User capabilities related to the product domain and technology
For my case study, I was able to identify 13 variables. It’s important to keep in mind that every project will vary so the number of variables under each category will also vary.
2.2 Map Variables
After identifying the behavior patterns for each interview subject, you want to map each interviewee against each variable. I want to point out that some of these variables might represent behaviors on a spectrum. For example, in my project, experienced trainer to inexperienced trainer. Or the variables might be more definite choices. Such as manual tracking vs digital tracking. It doesn’t matter the precise point that subjects are mapped to but more so their placement in relation to other subjects. You ultimately want to arrive at an accurate representation of subject clusters for each variable.
Once the mapping is complete you want to look for clusters that occur across multiple ranges. Depending on how many variables you identify, similar clusters across 5 or more variables will likely signify a significant behavior pattern that will form the basis of a single persona.
I need to point out that correlation does not imply causation. Just because behaviors cluster together does not mean that there is a valid pattern. While you’re identifying patterns make sure to keep this in mind and only highlight those patterns that have a valid connection.
Step 3: Make it Complete
3.1 Synthesize Characteristics
For each significant behavior pattern, go through your notes and synthesize the information concerning those cluster subjects. Briefly jot down characteristics relating to goals, frustrations or pain points, the use environment, and other relevant information that would relate to the eventual product use. Also, name your personas using an alliteration format that relates to the type of user your personas is. For example, Chrystal the Corporate Trainer and Paul the Private Trainer. Alliterating the names helps in remembering and further connecting your personas to your product.
Once synthesized, check your mappings and characteristics to see if there are any gaps in information. Also, check your personas to make sure that they vary enough between each other to represent the diverse behaviors of your users. If you come across similar personas, remove one of them, or reassess your data to determine if there is any information that you missed or if more interviews need to be conducted.
3.2 Expand Descriptions
The characteristics that you jot down are a great framework, but they, unfortunately, leave much of your personas lacking.
Expand the description of your personas by creating a narrative that is 1–2 pages in length. By its nature, when you create a narrative there will be some fictional information to create a comprehensive story and humanize your persona. However, the vast majority of your narrative should be backed by the information gathered from your interviews.
The narrative I created began by introducing the personas in terms of his/her job and then went on to describe a brief day-in-the-life of the persona as it directly related to the product. I also included a section for goals and frustrations that are represented by quotes taken from my interviews.
To complete your personas include images to represent them and add any demographic information. To further deepen the connection to your personas, you want to choose photographs to be added to your narratives. This is in contrast to the sketches used when creating ad-hoc personas. These photographs should represent your personas by expressing any relevant demographic information and ideally hint at the environment that the user will use the product.
When adding in demographic information, I would error on the side of less is more. Unless relevant to the use of the product, I would avoid including age, race, income, marital status, or geographical location. If not relevant, information like this can be distracting and lead to bias (unintended or otherwise).
3.3 Assign Persona Types
The final touch to your personas is to designate the persona types. It’s important to designate persona types because it helps to focus your designs and serves as a decider when considering adding or removing features. Remember to keep to the adage of design for the primary, accommodate the secondary (tertiary, quaternary, etc.). Cooper describes the 6 persona types as:
Primary — primary target/user; only 1 persona
Secondary — can be satisfied by the primary but has additional requirements
Supplemental — satisfied by a combination of the primary and secondary requirements
Customer — need of customers and not end-users
Served — not users of the product but are directly affected by the use of the product
Negative — users that the product is not built to serve
I made Paul my primary persona because the majority of the trainers I interviewed were private trainers. I made Chrystal my secondary persona because, as a corporate trainer, she has additional requirements from private trainers. Technically, the trainer’s clients would be a served persona, but I didn’t do any interviews with clients, so I didn’t feel comfortable creating a persona with so little data.
In summary, the process is to:
- Collect and organize your information by interviewing and taking notes. Remember to interview a wide and diverse population of your users to ensure that you get a great representation of attitudes.
- Identify behavior patterns expressed by your users by mapping users to a set of variables and then identifying clusters within those variables.
- Put together the characteristics expressed by those clusters into personas and expand the descriptions of them.
Personas are great and powerful tools when it comes to the design process. However, it can be daunting to know where to begin. I hope following this guide will give you an understanding and starting point for creating exceptional personas. For a more in-depth look at personas and persona creation check out:
View the complete case study mentioned in this post here:
