Persona creation is a technique used in Design Thinking that supports a more human-centric, aligned, and data-driven design process. In this guide, find out all about personas and how you can create them for your own product or service.
Design Thinking is an empathetic, user-centered, and iterative design process that is used for solving complex user problems and generating innovative and out-of-the-box solutions. The role of personas in Design Thinking is to bridge the gap between designers and their users, ensuring that products and services meet real user needs and expectations. These fictional user descriptions serve to support a human-centric approach to design that leads to a more effective process and more successful outcomes.
In this article, we want to explore the importance and contribution of personas in the Design Thinking process. We’ll also be providing a step-by-step guide on how to create your own personas that truly reflect your users, support team, and stakeholder alignment, and drive impactful design decisions.
Contents:
- What are user personas?
- Why personas are used during Design Thinking
- What are the qualities of a good persona?
- Different types of personas in Design Thinking
- How to create a persona - 6 steps
- Design Thinking Persona- FAQs
- Conclusion
Let’s get started!
What are user personas?
A user persona is a description of a specific type of user’s demographic, needs, goals, and behaviors. Based on extensive user research data, personas are used by designers, marketers, and business leaders to better understand the types of people who might use their service, product, app, website, or brand. A deeper understanding of the people they are designing for helps design teams to ensure that user needs are more accurately met, their goals understood, and any challenges they face are more quickly resolved.
A persona has the following information about a fictional user: :
- Name
- Age
- Occupation
- Location
- Short biography
- Goals
- Pain points
- Scenarios
Why personas are used during Design Thinking
Personas are a useful tool employed in Design Thinking to help teams visualize and understand the people they are designing for. By imagining a specific individual interacting with their products, teams develop a more human-centered approach that promotes empathy. With user personas and Design Thinking in tow, teams often create product designs that more accurately align with user expectations, meet user needs, and produce genuinely meaningful experiences. Personas also act as a constant reminder of who a product is being designed for which keeps everyone on the design team focused and aligned.
In addition to supporting an empathetic approach to a Design-Thinking-led project, user personas are an invaluable tool when it comes to decision-making and prioritization, too. Thanks to user personas, a design team is much better placed to know which solutions are of the greatest importance and which parts of a project should be completed before others. This is because the team is able to refer to the greatest needs of the persona and can better evaluate which solutions will make the greatest positive difference to that user.
Another advantage to using user personas is the focus they bring to the ideation phase of Design Thinking, as personas ensure this solution-generating phase always begins with a clear focus on the target user’s specific goals and challenges. User personas facilitate a focused ideation session, ensuring that the team does not get distracted by other problems or solutions and instead seeks only to solve the challenge of that user. The end result is a selection of ideas and solutions that are truly beneficial in solving the problem at hand.
Finally, a user persona helps a design team recruit the right users for user research and testing. Based on the persona, the team is able to compile an accurate list of criteria and characteristics that will be needed from the users they recruit for these research-heavy sessions.
What are the qualities of a good persona?
Here’s a short list of the qualities you’ll typically see in a well-put-together user persona:
- Lots of detail and description
- Builds a clear picture of a realistic and relatable character
- Contains information based on collected data and research from real users
- Functions as an actionable guide for the design team to work from
Different types of personas in Design Thinking
Let’s explore the different types of personas used by teams who have adopted a Design Thinking approach to their product or service design.
1. Proto-personas
A provisional, stripped-back persona, the proto-persona is created using the design team’s assumptions and existing knowledge about the users of their product or service, rather than based on concrete data collected from user research. Typically employed during the earlier stages of the design process when a team is short on time or resources, they are a tool for understanding what the team currently knows and where knowledge gaps may lie. It would be unwise to proceed with a design project based on proto-personas alone as the knowledge used to create them is unverified.
2. Qualitative personas
With their foundations in user research, qualitative personas combine different data points collected by the team which together provide an accurate picture of an individual’s behaviors, needs, challenges, and goals. These personas tend to be rich in detail and have a strong narrative focus, with emphasis placed on understanding the “why” behind user actions.
3. Statistical personas
Sometimes referred to as a quantitative persona, a statistical persona is built from data gathered from a team’s quantitative research methods, such as surveys, questionnaires, and demographic studies, and is grounded primarily in numerical data. The advantages of employing statistical personas include providing a valid representation of user segments, a better understanding of the scale and scope of user needs, support in identifying market segments, and assistance with data-driven decision-making.
4. Hybrid personas
Combining elements of qualitative and quantitative research methods, hybrid personas aim to include both the detailed and narrative-driven aspects of qualitative personas and the data-driven aspects of quantitative personas. This approach provides the design team with a comprehensive and holistic view of their users and this can effectively inform the design decisions behind a product or service.
How to create a persona - A 6-step guide
Let’s take a look at the six concrete steps you need to take to create a persona.
1. Define objectives
Your first step in creating a persona is to define your business goals, the goals of the user, and the goals of the design team. By identifying, aligning, and communicating your teams’ goals, you are in a better position to conduct focused research that produces the quantitative and qualitative data you need to progress. It will also ensure that there is no mismatch between the overarching aims of your persona and your project. An important part of defining your objectives will involve establishing which customer segment you and your team need to know more details about. It’s ok at this stage to make an assumption about which demographic you will be honing in on here, based on your knowledge of the product or service and your current end users.
Some examples of objectives are:
- Better understand user needs
- Improve user empathy
- Guide design decisions
- Know which features to prioritize
- Identify user segments/demographics
- Support marketing strategies
- Identify user pain points and challenges
- Improve the overall user experience
2. Conduct user research
Next up, you’ll want to start conducting in-depth research into your users. Popular methods for doing this include interviews, surveys, questionnaires, and observations which can offer deep insights into user behavior, needs, and preferences. This research and real-world data (both statistical and anecdotal) will form the foundation of the personas you will go on to create and enable you to more accurately understand the users you are hoping to serve.
Start this process by drawing up a list of the questions that will help you uncover the data you need from your users about their expectations, needs, and preferences. These questions might start off establishing facts about their age, location, and occupation, and move on to ask about their experiences with the product or service, their goals when using the platform, and how well all interactions met their expectations.
With your questions ready, you can start distributing your surveys and conducting user interviews. While the survey data will be able to support statistical analysis, interviewing users is also worthwhile as it’s an opportunity to gather anecdotal evidence and stories that reveal how users really feel about the product. An excellent example of user research in practice is this Research Project by AND learners.
3. Identify patterns and insights
The next step is to analyze the data you’ve collected from interviews and questionnaires, looking for common patterns, themes, and insights among users. This might include shared opinions on the product, recurring challenges, or similar motivations. This analysis will support a better understanding of different user types and personal characteristics.
Be careful to organize and label your data clearly. You might find affinity mapping a useful exercise to conduct at this stage as it can make it easier to find themes or patterns in the data that you may otherwise miss. It’s a good idea to group different types of users into segments that are defined by the patterns and insights you have uncovered. By segmenting your data, you are well-positioned to better reflect the range of user types in your audience.
4. Develop persona details
With each user segment now identified, you can create detailed user personas. These should include demographic information such as age, location, and occupation, as well as user behaviors, needs, and pain points. When your personas are completed, you should find that you have complete and relatable pictures of each type of user.
Here is a persona template that you can follow to ensure you have the details the design team will need to move forward with a project:
- Name
- Photo
- Job Title
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income
- Education
- Primary goals
- Secondary goals
- Usage patterns
- Technology proficiency
- Primary pain points
- Secondary pain points
- Main motivators
- Preferred communication channels
- Information sources
- Scenario 1
- Scenario 2
5. Add goals and scenarios
As you can see from the template above, you’ll need to create goals and scenarios for your persona in order to visualize what they want to achieve and how they might achieve it with your product or service. This information provides valuable context for any design decisions the team is weighing up and helps improve understanding of the user’s perspective.
6. Visualize the persona
With the details of your persona or personas clarified, you may wish to create a visual representation of each one, incorporating elements such as a photo and key attributes to each in order to make the persona as relatable as possible. While this step is not essential, it can be a useful tool for reminding team members and project stakeholders of who they are creating the product for and what their key needs are.
Design Thinking Persona FAQs
We’ve answered your most pressing questions about personas here.
1. What is the purpose of personas?
In Design Thinking, the role of the persona is to offer a detailed and relatable representation of different user segments in order to support the design team in understanding their users’ motivations, behaviors, and challenges. This information guides and informs design decisions, ensuring the team is aligned, the design is user-centered, and the end product or service fully addresses real user needs. Personas also serve to establish good communication and alignment between design team members and project stakeholders through the shared understanding of the audience that is being catered to.
2. How can one define a persona in Design Thinking?
A persona is defined in Design Thinking as a fictional yet data-driven description of a product or service’s typical user. This description includes the key characteristics of a specific user such as demographic and personal background information and combines that with the typical needs, motivations, challenges, and behaviors of the fictional individual. The goal of the persona is to guide design decisions, align the design team, enable a better understanding of target groups, and promote an empathetic and human-centric approach to design.
3. What is the persona approach?
In Design Thinking, a persona approach involves creating fictional representations of the product or service’s target users. This activity helps the design team better understand user needs, behaviors, goals, and pain points which in turn informs more user-centric and successful designs. It also supports team and stakeholder communication, enables better team alignment, and keeps the focus on the user at all times throughout the design process.
Conclusion
There you have it–the importance of personas in Design Thinking and how you can create one yourself. As we’ve seen, personas are crucial for helping UX designers and stakeholders get a real sense of the individuals they are designing their products and services for, developing a human-centred and empathetic approach and aligning a design with user expectations. They’re also a handy tool for communicating user needs and challenges across teams and keeping everyone focused.
We hope that with our step-by-step guide, you’re able to create accurate and relatable user personas that can inform your designs and enable you to fully meet the expectations and needs of your audience. If you’d like to learn more about Design Thinking, head back to the AND Academy blog for more articles like this one.
Next Steps
We hope this guide on personas in design thinking could help you with your design endeavors. In case you need further assistance, here are some resources you can consider:
- Watch this session by Shiva Viswanathan, Design Head of Ogilvy Pennywise, and Naman Singh, Product Experience Designer at RED.
- Talk to a course advisor to discuss how you can transform your career with one of our courses.
- Pursue our UX UI Design course, which is taught through live, interactive classes by industry experts, and comes with a Job Guarantee.
- Take advantage of our scholarship and funding options to overcome any financial hurdle on the path of your career transformation.
Note: All information and/or data from external sources is believed to be accurate as of the date of publication.
