Personas
DIY-Learn-personasDIYLearn
Personas
Copyright © 2016 The Open University
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Contents
· Personas
· 1 What are personas?
· 2 When and why to use personas
· 3 How personas can help to create empathy
· 4 Creating personas
· 4.1Personas: a case study
· 5 Using a persona
· Summary
· Self-assessment questions
· End of Module Quiz
· References and acknowledgements
Personas
This module will support your understanding and use of the Personas Tool from the DIY Toolkit. You should look at the Personas Template 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.
Start of Study Note
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).
End of Study Note
1 What are personas?
Start of Figure
What is a persona?
End of Figure
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.
Start of Study Note
Key point
Personas are short profiles of real (or blends of real) service users or project beneficiaries.
End of Study Note
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.
(Adapted from Moulder and Yaar, 2007, pp. 22–27)
Start of Activity
Activity 1
Allow around 10 minutes for this activity
Check your understanding
Start of Question
- Which of the two statements best represents your understanding of personas?
End of Question
Personas are only used once a project is live, as a way to understand how users are engaging with it.
Personas can be used to inform or influence project, business or service development at any stage of its life cycle.
View discussion - Untitled part
Start of Question
- A team has been charged with creating a learning centre and designing a multipurpose curriculum for educating displaced children from several different countries residing in a refugee camp.
What role could the use of personas play in the curriculum-design process for the centre? What benefits will personas bring to the planning process? Make some notes in answer to these questions in the text box below.
End of Question
Provide your answer...
View discussion - Untitled part
End of Activity
3 How personas can help to create empathy
Start of Figure
Empathy: walking a mile in someone else’s shoes
End of Figure
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.
Start of Activity
Activity 2
Allow around 25 minutes for this activity
Think about someone at work, either a colleague or one of your customers, partners, clients, beneficiaries etc.
Start of Question
- In the text box below, make a note of the facts that you know about them, for example:
· age
· gender
· what you know about their job or other role
· where they live.
End of Question
Provide your answer...
Start of Question
- Now consider the same person from a different perspective.
· What can you guess about how they feel?
· What motivates them?
· What is likely to cause them concern?
· What makes them happy?
Make some notes in answer to these questions in the text box below.
End of Question
Provide your answer...
Start of Question
Finally, reflect on the difference between these two perspectives on the same person; the factual and empathy-based perspectives. Can you see how empathising with someone could help you understand them and therefore be better at meeting their needs? Make some notes in the text box below.
End of Question
Provide your answer...
View discussion - Untitled part
End of Activity
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 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.
4.1Personas: 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.
Start of Box
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.)
Start of Figure
Figure 1: Doris’s persona
End of Figure
End of Box
Start of Activity
Activity 3
Allow around 20 minutes for this activity
Start of Question
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.
End of Question
Provide your answer...
View discussion - Activity 3
End of Activity
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:
Start of Figure