Persona Spectrum
Persona Spectrum is a method that can help us to build personas. It’s useful on sorting out the type of users and then help a team to reach their consensus.
Why we need persona Spectrum? Something wrong?
Normally, we researcher used to interview with 5 users. We used to analyze the information if it is enough, and then, we get our personas.
But, sometimes we can’t reach a consensus even everyone participate in the whole process. Different members may want to use different ways to sort out user type. That may cost the team a lot of time on discussion. We need a method to help us be efficient. And, that is what Persona Spectrum can do.
The process of Persona Spectrum:
- Setting：Gather the information from users(interview etc..)
- Definite some key characteristics of the difference between each users
- Draw the spectrum line of the key characteristics
- Put the users you just interview onto the spectrum line
- Use the visualization graphic to analyze
- Final result: Get your personas!
Example:
Let me use Google Map as an example to explain! And, for explaining it concretely, let’s focus on the personas of navigation feature.
- First, setting, let’s arrange the information of users:
(The fake information is fabricated by me for taking an example)
2. Definite some key characteristics of the difference between each user
3. Draw the spectrum line of the key characteristics
For the part, we can use color to visualize the information. I pick some of them to draw these lines.
4. Put the users you just interview onto the spectrum line
5. Use the visualization graphic to analyze
In the part, we can find some pattern that shows the same or the contrary characters of users. That would help to
For example, these two female users are similar:
And, these two male users are similar
So, we get the pattern of the same type of user. Then what we get is…
6. Final result: Get your personas!
The conclusion of Persona Spectrum
It’s a method that can help team to reach a consensus of persona. The method simplicity information through visualization and sorting. And then a team can easily analyze to get the result.
And, actually, the example is just an example. Please be cautious with the real situation. Like that, 5 interviewees or more? Persona for a specific feature or whole product? what kind of characters of users should we pick up? We still have to be flexible to analyze. The method is not perfect.
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If you are interested in the method of design and product development, you can also read the series of “Data x UX”. The series of article deeply share my experience of UX:
If the article is useful to you, please give me some 👏, thanks:)
