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Personas
Personas
This module will support your understanding and use of the Personas Tool from the DIY Toolkit. You should look at the Personas Template which can be found on page 74 of the DIY Toolkit, before working through the module. You will find it helpful to have a print out of the Personas Template with you while you work through this module.
When planning and managing projects or development activities, one of the foremost questions on the mind of planners, designers, decision makers and managers is:
- Who are my beneficiaries and users, and what are they looking for from the project or development activity?
It is important that you, as a project manager or decision maker, have a way of deciphering the needs and behaviours of your target audience(s), in order to best plan for services or activities that satisfy their needs.
This is where personas – short profiles of model project beneficiaries or users – can play a useful role in helping you to gain a clearer understanding of your target audience. This module explores what personas are and how they are used to help focus a project on the needs of its user group.
Learning outcomes
After studying this module, you should be able to:
- describe what a persona is and identify why and when to use it (SAQ 1)
- explore how personas can be applied to create empathy between planners and their target audience (SAQ 2)
- use a persona to create an identity for a target group (SAQ 3)
- construct a persona (SAQ 4).
1 What are personas?
Personas are word profiles of fictional but realistic individuals that are used to describe particular groups in your intended audience.
The persona is given a name, age, gender and perhaps even a picture, coupled with some insight into their lifestyle, aspirations and motivations for wanting to engage with or use the project or service at issue.
Time and budgetary constraints tend to mean that service or project managers, development workers and field agents seldom meet on a one-to-one basis with their target audience. As a surrogate for real users, personas present and identify the motivation, aspirations and expectations driving their behaviour and attitude in a way that is easy to relate to. This knowledge is essential to ensure services, projects or programmes are designed with the end users in mind. Personas can be used to:
- identify benefits and features to include in a project or development activity to ensure that value is delivered to beneficiaries or users of the project
- communicate to all stakeholders the vision for the project and how it will meet the needs of the users
- develop scenarios for user testing
- contribute to the marketing efforts for the project or development activity.
It is important to be clear that personas are based on facts. For a persona to have real value in influencing and guiding the planning or design process for a project or development activity, it is essential that it’s developed from data collected about real beneficiaries or users. So, although a persona is a fictional person, they are designed to represent real data.
Key point
Personas are short profiles of real (or blends of real) service users or project beneficiaries.
2 When and why to use personas
Personas enable project managers and service planners to see their project or service through the eyes of users and beneficiaries. There are great benefits to this:
- bringing focus to the planning process
personas can help you identify and define your target audience or group
- building empathy between users and planners/managers
help planners/managers to see how things look and feel from the perspectives of the user
- encouraging consensus building
ensure shared vision and a buy-in into the project/service development process
- creating efficiency
personas help decision makers to make key decisions early in the design process to avoid wasting money and time later.
Activity 1
Check your understanding
a.
Personas are only used once a project is live, as a way to understand how users are engaging with it.
b.
Personas can be used to inform or influence project, business or service development at any stage of its life cycle.
The correct answer is b.
Discussion
Although a persona can be used to represent a group of users and how they are engaging with a project, based on real data about those users, this is not the only possible use for personas. They are suitable for informing and influencing decisions at any point in a project. However, they are particularly useful for informing and influencing decisions before a commitment is made to a cause of action.
3 How personas can help to create empathy
Empathy is about experiencing someone else’s feelings as if you were that person, and is a valuable way to gain insight into the behaviour of project beneficiaries. A popular phrase in some cultures is to ‘walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’. This isn’t meant literally, but is a metaphor for empathy.
The nature of a persona, presenting a rich picture of a person with a name and backstory, can help you to empathise with the feelings and motivations of the audience behind that image.
Activity 2
Think about someone at work, either a colleague or one of your customers, partners, clients, beneficiaries etc.
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 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.
4.1 Personas: a case study
The DIY Toolkit Personas template is a good basic framework for building personas. However in real life, you may have to expand or reduce the questions and or subsections, or change the template design to reflect the problem at hand.
The need for the personas, how many are required, and how detailed they should be will determine who will be involved in the process of creating them.
Case Study 1: Attracting students to the Postgraduate Leadership Development Programme
The Federal Ministry of Commerce in a developing country entered into a joint working contract with a leading university in the United States to help develop their next generation of senior managers and head of departments. This will be achieved through participation in the Postgraduate Leadership Development Programme, to be delivered in partnership with a local university.
Two years after signing the agreement, the programme has not been able to attract enough students to justify its existence. The Ministry is trying to understand why uptake is so low, and colleagues at the US university suggested using personas as a way to explore the needs and motivations of the target group.
Members of the project team from the Ministry interviewed three men and three women who would qualify for the programme, but have not yet applied. One of the men has complicated and demanding family commitments that are making it difficult for him to hold down his job, and would prohibit him from taking on any additional commitments. Among the other five, though, there are three common threads to their responses:
- they were only vaguely aware of the programme and did not think they qualified to participate
- they thought it would cost them money
- they didn’t believe their participation would be supported by their line managers, particularly with regard to allowing them time away from their desks to study.
These common points, along with other general information (including the restrictions on who qualifies for the programme), were sufficient to start building a persona. The draft persona, named Doris, is shown in Figure 1 below. (Please note that the team have used a stock photo to represent Doris.)
Activity 3
Look again at the case study above and Doris’s persona (Figure 1).
If you were a member of the project team, what would you advise the Ministry to do next? Make some notes in answer to this question in the text box below.
Discussion
The project team should now decide whether:
- a.this is sufficient information for them to start defining the problem and building a response
or
- b.they should use a survey to test whether these points really are common across a much wider selection of the target group.
If there are any other trends attributable to identifying features – such as gender, location, or duration of employment – they could also divide the persona into two or more. However, the project team must be careful not to stereotype (for example, by assuming that all the women will want to have children – and therefore need career breaks – just because Doris wants to). Depending on time constraints, they could start a cautious response, perhaps by changing the way they promote the programme and emphasising the qualifying criteria and that it is free. They could also plan some sort of engagement with potential line-managers of qualifying students. They could then organise a survey, to run at the same time, to check that they are taking the right course of action before they commit more resources to this solution.
5 Using a persona
Figure 2 below shows a summary of points that we have made already, condensed into a five-step reminder to help you in your own process of constructing personas:
Activity 4
Now that you have nearly completed studying this module, you should be ready to start thinking about how to use personas to gain insight into users, customers or beneficiaries of your own work. Make an action plan for the next steps, filling in Table 1 below.
| Tasks | To completed by ... | Working with ... | I will need ... |
Discussion
Your plan will be personal to you, but it should be formed around the five-step guide above to make sure you cover all the necessary tasks.
Summary
This module has described what a persona is and explored why and where you would use personas in a project or business development life cycle. It has guided you in exploring how to construct a persona to represent and create empathy with the needs of a user group, and highlighted the challenge and risk associated with using and creating personas.
Self-assessment questions
SAQ 1
a.
A persona creates a profile of a typical user.
b.
Personas are a list of information about a service-user or client.
c.
Personas are grounded in research.
d.
Personas can help bring focus to a planning process.
The correct answers are a, c and d.
SAQ 2
a.
User research
b.
Defining markets
c.
Feasibility testing
The correct answer is a.
a.
Sympathy
b.
Understanding
c.
Empathy
The correct answer is c.
a.
Negotiating
b.
Listening
c.
Sensitivity
The correct answer is a.
SAQ 3
Drag and drop the words below into the missing gaps in the sentences.
SAQ 4
Put these five steps in the order in which they are presented in this module:
Two lists follow, match one item from the first with one item from the second. Each item can only be matched once. There are 5 items in each list.
Carry out your own research and observation
Condense the research
Brainstorm
Include the broader team in the process
Develop an intimate knowledge of each persona
Match each of the previous list items with an item from the following list:
a.Step 2
b.Step 3
c.Step 1
d.Step 4
e.Step 5
- 1 = c,
- 2 = a,
- 3 = b,
- 4 = d,
- 5 = e
End of Module Quiz
Congratulations, you have now reached the end of this module! We hope that you have enjoyed it, and have learned useful skills.
End of Module Quiz
This quiz allows you to work towards your badge for DIY Learn: Personas. To achieve your badge, you must answer six out of eight questions correctly.
- You can try each question three times.
- There is no limit to the number of attempts you can have to take the whole quiz.
- If you answer fewer than six questions correctly, you will need to start again if you want to earn your badge.
Don’t worry if you are not successful first time, as you will be able to attempt the quiz again in 24 hours.
You need to enrol in this course before you can attempt this quiz which you can do by clicking on the Sign up / Sign in button at the top of this page.
When you have finished the quiz, click on ‘Next’ to review your ‘Summary of attempt’. Once you are happy with your answers, click ‘Submit all and finish’. Once you have finished this quiz you will be redirected back to this page.
Don’t forget there are another nine modules to choose from which you can find on the DIY Learn home page.
References and acknowledgements
Inspired by: Business Design Toolkit (2010) Personas.
This Module should be cited as follows:
DIY Learn (2016) Personas, Copyright © The Open University and Nesta
Except for third party materials and otherwise stated below, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ by-nc-sa/ 4.0/). The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence for this project, and not subject to the Creative Commons Licence. This means that this material may only be used un-adapted within the DIY Learn project and not in any subsequent OER versions.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce the material in this module:
Figure 'empathy': © SQUAMISH/iStockphoto.com
Figure 1: © Henrique NDR Martins/iStockphoto.com