Well-crafted personas have great benefits!

In 1983, Alan Cooper created the first design persona, realizing how focusing on real customer motivations could spark better solutions. Personas have become standard for many human-centered designers. And with it, in an industry that is changing every day, lots of critiques came by.

— Personas are an excellent tool, but ONLY IF they are well-crafted — . But then again, what design model would work if it’s not well crafted and genuinely based on research? It is simple to bias your results to what your stakeholders, clients, or even you want to hear. So YES, Personas won’t work when stereotypical and biased, but neither does any other model or research finding. Our goal as human-centered designers is to communicate what the lives of our users are really like, not some idealized version that is easier to swallow.

Let’s started by describing what User Persona is. Personas are fictional characters whose goals and characteristics represent a broader group of potential users.

Well executed personas should include:

• Demographic details and personal details: to bring the persona to life, give them a name and make them rememberable. Try not to bring unimportant stereotypical information.
• Attitudinal and cognitive details
• Goals and motivations (or jobs-to-be-done)
• Behavioral details.

To create these well-executed Personas, you need to:

1. Do research. Primary and secondary. Quantitative and qualitative. The amount of research you’ll need will depend on the project you are working on and the information you already have.
2. Identify behavioral patterns. Cluster information, create insights, find what behaviors are repeating.
3. Create personas. Build the Personas from the patterns you have. The information from one person is not enough to build a Persona since it is not a pattern. Remember that Personas are detailed descriptions of a person as an archetype exemplifying a group of people.
4. Validate.

Using a predesign persona format or worksheet will help you know where to start. But keep in mind that personas are a live tool, it should adapt to each project and iterate while the project goes by.

Once you have these Personas, you will find many benefits in your method. Some of them will be:

• Build empathy. User personas help you create empathy with the person you are designing for.
• Provide direction for making decisions. While you should keep going back to your research whenever you make big decisions, your personas will help you remember the most important patterns of your customers. Giving them a name and personality would make it easier for you and your team to keep them top of mind.
• Communicate research findings. Not all your team members will always have the opportunity to talk to your clients. Personas are a great communication tool.

So I’ll encourage you next time you are tackling a human-center design solution. Bring personas to life, be more mindful of keeping the real user at the heart of everything your team does.