Creating a Persona

James Reinhard
Jul 20, 2017 · 2 min read

In my previous entry, my team and I had started our User Experience project. We had met with project owner, Lincoln Savings Bank (LSB), and they were asking us to redesign their web site.

The first step in the process was to conduct interviews on a wide variety of individuals, including new customers, long time customers, those with personal accounts and those with business accounts, as well as some individuals who worked for LSB. The information we gathered from these interviews were used as the basis to create our personas.

A persona is an imaginary individual designed to fill the role of the target audience. But the persona isn’t merely a set of characteristics used to generalize customers; a persona needs a name, a backstory and goals. The persona is treated as a real a person and whom we design the web site for. We have to put ourselves in the persona’s shoes and ask questions such as: “How will they use the site?”, “what will the click on and why?”, “does this accomplish their goals?” Here is an example of one of our earlier personas:

For the purposes of our design we needed to focus on a single persona. The goal was to increase use by organic customers so that is the persona we chose as the focus of our design. Megan Vayner is young person, who also is a designer, unfamiliar with banking and looking for a bank to start a savings account. Although the persona went through a few redesigns over the course of the project, this the final version we settled on while continuing through the project:

In my next entry I’ll go into detail on how the personas influenced design when we get into the mental models and context scenarios of the project.

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