Designing Personas

OVERVIEW

This workshop explores:

Why are personas so important to the design process?
How might we use these to work with clients and teams to create much better products and services?
What are some tools and frameworks to guide us?
What are some shortcuts, trade-offs, and downsides to watch for?

Beyond the theory, we will share best practices and tools to improve our facilitator fitness!

Why Personas?

We all work in a field that involves working with clients. During the process, we introduce who we are and what our purpose is through a visioning and missioning exercise. The language is often extremely general and does not describe how the company will do it or how it will actually look.

The persona exercise is very helpful when you have a service, product, or concept that needs to be tested against real humans.

“Always ask where is that individual, unique human that we are trying to help.” — Peter Durand

Kevin Starr is the director of a small family foundation that funds organizations that solve needs at the $2/day level. When approached with an idea, he will have the client undergo a long process to test their idea. The goal of this is to see if their idea will survive reality.

Kevin highlights the idea called the “Impact Jackpot.”

This is where there is a need whether it's global, local, or individual and there is potential to grow a solution for that need.

Additionally, you (the person with the service, product, or concept) have what they need and they will use it.

How?

But how does one create a persona? Peter shows the group a template that they have worked on and evolved over time.

But for any persona you want the basic elements — which are their demographics:

Age & gender identity
Where they live
Highest level of education
Occupation- field
Family structure or network
Goals/needs- personally or professionally
Hobbies and activities
Frustrations and challenges
What other details influence their health and behavior?

It often helps to bring the person to life by giving them a nickname and a motto.

This helps sum up what that person is about and what their goals are. There is also a website that will generate an image of a person that does not exist.

Q & A

Q: How do we stay away from labels?

Part of the persona work is to move past labels. Peter has dealt with this a lot while working in homelessness; people will label a person experiencing homelessness as homeless or a homeless person. The correct way is to say homelessness, it is a condition they are currently experiencing.

When facilitating people through situations like this, they may get triggered by some of these demographics. As facilitators, it is important to move them through it and not focus on that “label” but rather create it as a piece of their story.

Adding more elements to their life story helps us with our design work.

Which is always the goal: What is our design work and what is the goal of the design work?

Q: How would we embed this in a full cycle?

In particular, how would we relate the creation of persona with the initial study of an environment or conditions that are most relevant to the conditions of the community we are working with?

The source article is a good resource for this. This is just one module that is wrapped around other scanning and focus data points, and patient stories. This type of work feeds and weaves into another body of work.

You can create a persona as a hypothesis, as done in the workshop, and use that persona to find people that embody the hypothesis created.

Once you find them, you can interview them and update the hypothesis. The persona is used as a representation. It is important to learn from the people we talk to update our persona.

We want to make sure there is an authentic voice in the room. Interviews are one way to do this and personas are another. These are tools that can be used when we need them as appropriate.