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.
Personas