Understand your users with the help of personas
If you don’t have real users available, create a stand-in to serve as a surrogate.
You’ve performed your stakeholder analysis, identified several user classes, and perhaps lined up some people to serve as product champions, key representatives of those user classes. But what if you’re building a mass-market product and can’t connect with actual users to present needs and to assess your design proposals? Or perhaps a product champion or a focus group won’t always be available to answer the development team’s questions. Consider creating personas as substitutes for those absent human beings.
A persona is a description of an archetypical person that analysts and product designers can use to stand in for a particular group of users (Cooper et al., 2014). Personas provide a way to bring the abstraction of a user class to life by describing a specific — though imaginary — person who’s a member of the class. I read a novel recently that was based on historical events. The author stated that some of his characters were composites of real people he had known. Personas represent idealized, composite people in that same sense.
You don’t invent a persona out of thin air and guesses. Base your persona descriptions on what you’ve learned from market research, customer site visits, users of your previous products, demographic…
