4 Creating personas

Before you start creating a persona, you’ll need to think about:

• who the target group for the personas is and what they need
• how you plan to use the personas and what types of decision they will inform
• the resources you have available to invest in the process of creating the personas.

There are two main approaches to creating personas:

• Quantitative – this approach is about testing and proving something with a large sample size, using large data-collection techniques such as surveys. The Question Ladder Template from page 60 of the DIY Toolkit [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]   will help you think about the right questions to get the required information.
• Qualitative – this involves finding out about users or beneficiaries by talking to a small number of those people. Because of the small sample size, this approach doesn’t provide robust evidence about the group. However, it is valuable at uncovering insights about users or beneficiaries that can then be tested.

The key difference between the two approaches is that quantitative research is better at telling you what is happening while qualitative research is better at telling you why it’s happening. The richest personas will come from a combination of both approaches.

An individual can carry out their own user research and construct personas to make sense of target audiences. Nevertheless, social projects and development activities are rarely about individuals but about a group of people who share a common purpose, working to achieve given objectives. Therefore, good practice suggests a stakeholder group approach to creating personas.

Besides the diversity of opinions informing the personas, another benefit of a stakeholder approach is consensus building to create a rich picture of the target audience. Stakeholder involvement in the building of personas will go a long way to raising the credibility of the personas and their value as a reference point for making difficult design or service decisions.

Like any other decision-making tool, personas have their limitations, challenges and associated risks, including:

• stereotyping and unrealistic assumptions being made in the planning and design process
• the need to have direct access to the target audience, especially to carry out interviews and/or surveys
• closed cultures in organisations or within project teams, which don’t favour joint working and decision making.