Persona-based content design
Personas are crucial for creating and testing content. Find out why and how we use personas at Scope, and what challenges we have faced when using them.
What are personas?
Personas are fictional characters that represent our target audience. They reflect our audience’s observed behaviours and attitudes, and express their needs, goals, behaviours, concerns and struggles.
We include some demographics and personality traits to make the character feel like a real person, as well as how confident they are with technology and the main challenge they face during a specific stage of their lives, such as parenthood.
How personas help us design content
The purpose of our work is to provide useful content to disabled people and their families. Personas can help guide our user-centred research and content design. They help us understand who is going to read our content and how we can make the content as accessible as possible. Personas can also help us design a better user journey by pointing out what content is useful to our audience and how they might find it.
Types of personas we use
Proto-personas
Proto-personas are what we believe are our audience’s behaviours, attitudes and goals. They are great for team brainstorming to see how well we know our audience. We create them before starting research. They provide us with the structure for our final personas but do not represent the target users.
Research-based personas
To create the research-based personas, we conduct several interviews to understand the information our users need or would find useful to know more about. We look for patterns in the data: what is repeatedly mentioned by our target audience? What is the most important information for them? We use these findings to correct the assumptions from our proto-personas. As a result, in some cases we may drop some of the proto-personas or create new personas to reflect these characteristics.
Test personas
Test personas help us to recruit users to test for a specific content piece faster. Test personas have attributes, such as type of audience, experience with disability, professional situation and relationship status. We associate numbers to each of these attributes. The test persona is a code resulting from the combination of these numbers.
Challenges when building personas
The main challenge with test personas was that we needed them to be short, applicable to all the research topics, and easily understood by both User Researchers and Content Designers. One of the alternatives to avoid this challenge is to associate numbers to each attribute. Although the association between numbers and attributes covered many characteristics of potential recruits, in some cases we may need to add further information for some specific content in the recruitment briefs.
Another challenge was that our team has been working across 14 different subject areas. This means that when we started to research, our knowledge was superficial and sparse. Having so many topics to explore meant that the personas process also had to be gradual. We decided to build a certain number of personas for each topic, based on our research. When finished, we can gather the personas we have built along the way and improve them by seeing connections between the different topics. This will lead to a more accurate picture of our audience, the challenges they face and the information they need.
Step by step, we are progressing towards a better picture of our audience. This knowledge will inform our future research projects and help other teams within Scope to do their work too.
The impact of using personas in Scope
Personas are very versatile! You can use them for different purposes and in different ways. Using a variety of personas has improved how we recruit for testing content, made us more aware of our audience’s characteristics and needs, and enables us to write content that is focused on them and for them. To sum up, personas can help us build a user centred-process that makes us deliver better content at a faster pace.
