1 What are personas?

Cartoon1: showing four people seated around a table; man holding book with speech bubble “25-50 years, professionals, conforms to standard 4c…”; woman with head resting on hand with speech bubble “what?”; man asleep with speech bubble “zzzzz”; woman looking at mobile phone with speech bubble “eh?” Cartoon 2: showing four people standing in front of display board with three pieces of paper on it; man pointing to board with speech bubble “So we can see exactly who Doris is and why she might not sign up to the programme…”; woman pointing to the board with speech bubble “So THAT’S who we are looking for!”; man standing back from the board speaking to another woman with speech bubble “I know how to reach her!”
What is a persona?

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