Building perfect personas:

Personas:

- The objective is to create a reliable and realistic representation of the audience segments for
reference
- The representations should be based on both qualitative and quantitative data

Effective personas:

- Represent a major user group for the business

- Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of the most important users
- Give a clear picture of the users’ expectations
- Aid in uncovering universal features and functionality
- Describing people with backgrounds, goals and values

Benefits of personas:

Surrounding the business components and decisions by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the
conversation.

Help to:

- Evaluate new ideas

- Creating the overall look and feel of the service design
- Deciding which approaches to take based on user behaviours
- Ensure site content is written to the appropriate audience

How to develop personas?

- Limiting ourselves to the main audiences for the site

- Creating 3 or 4 personas Is the best thing to do
- The goal is not to represent all audiences but to focus on the major needs of the most important
user groups

To ensure that the personas are accurate representations of your audience, you must:

- Conduct user research: who are the customers, and why are they using the business, what
behaviours, assumptions and expectation colour their view of the system?
- Condense the research: looking for themes that’re specific, relevant and universal to the
business and users
- Brainstorm: organizing elements into persona groups that represent the target users
- Make them realistic: developing the appropriate descriptions of each personas background,
motivations and expectations, be serious

Questions to ask:

- Purpose of the business, goals of the business, age, gender, highest level of education, how
much experience
- What’s the background
 - Why will they come to the site
- Where’re getting information
- Which technologies are they using?
- What software do they use?
- Time spent in the website
- Motivations, and what’re they looking for

How to represent a persona:

- Persona group, fictional name, job titles and major responsibilities

- Demographics such as age, education and ethnicity …
- Goal and tasks that they’re trying to accomplish
- A quote that sums up what matters mot to the persona
- Casual pic

Turning the information collected into a real life story.