Design Basics: Understanding Personas

Learning the basics of Design Thinking? Here's a brief overview of a widely used method – called personas – that's helpful for understanding those for whom you design.

You most likely develop solutions for people.

Based on intuition or research, you make assumptions about who your users are and how your solutions will be experienced. Traditional market segmentation can be inefficient and ambiguous when used as a bridge for connecting the who with outcomes. Personas offer another approach to addressing that complex connection.

Personas are representations of fictitious yet realistic humans, used in guiding the design of solutions. Paraphrasing an early architect of the method, Alan Cooper1, a persona is a precise description of a made-up user and what he or she wishes to accomplish.

To illustrate, here's a useful collection of personas on Pinterest.

An essential ingredient in personas – and Design Thinking as a whole – is the concept of empathy. Empathy is the capacity to use ones imagination to understand what another person is experiencing and feeling. A persona is a valuable tool for achieving just that, imbuing the design process with meaningfulness and offering insight into user needs.

There are plenty of perspectives out there on how to build a persona. Here are some starters:

• How can you make a persona more familiar to designers? By telling an effective story. Even if your personas are demographically distant from the design team, rich storytelling can engender relatability. Stories are central to how we understand human experience. Use your storytelling abilities and you’re well on your way to creating engaging personas that inspire designers and stakeholders. For example, why not write in the first person and let your personas speak for themselves?
• An important part of building convincing personas is describing their motivations and goals. This helps inspire designers to contemplate what drives users; consider underlying needs and wants; foster empathy; and align parameters for customer success.
• Actionable personas require some groundwork in the form of qualitative, discovery-phase research. While solid interviews and fieldwork require preparation, you're probably already performing some form of informal data gathering. Opportunities for meeting and understanding users happen all the time, regardless of your field. And quantitative research can also support your personas, especially in ascertaining measurability and relevance.
• Understanding usage-context is part of developing personas. It's more about how users think than what they think. And of course, valuing why users think the way they do is connected to cognitive empathy.
• You can't design for everyone. Personas are not meant to represent broad markets. Believable personas should be unique, like real people. The constraint that this uniqueness creates is a natural part of the design process.
• Excuse the cliché, but pictures are worth a thousand words. Visual representation is an effective way to communicate your persona's culture. A head shot is important, but other images can be just as powerful in creating familiarity. Be creative in choosing objects or contexts which best illustrate your persona's beliefs, values and attitudes.

Here's a good resource for learning more about personas.

1 : "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum". 2004 : Sams Publishing