Paring Down Personas
In my last post, I wrote about the exciting Internet of Things project my team landed for our last 3 weeks of class. We came up with a survey and got some great responses, so I decided to synthesize that data to come up with our personas.
It took me all day.
I began by listing out each respondent’s role, and the specific needs they needed addressed by our product. Then I connected the like-minded needs by color coding them, and creating a higher-level list of eight categories. I re-wrote the roles who mentioned these categories next to the higher level data and began looking for similarities between them for grouping together. I made sure to group those roles together that fit with the data, but also made sense in the real world.
This was an exercise that has proven to be very helpful when designing the rest of our project. Our stack of qualitative data can be referenced very quickly and, I think, carries more weight when speaking with others about our design decisions.
