Before developing personas for your company or product, ask yourself these questions first (Part 2)
In a previous article (Before developing personas for your company or product, ask yourself these questions first (Part 1), we listed some questions to answer for yourself before developing personas for the team:
- Who will be your audience (stakeholders) of personas?
2. What will your audience (stakeholders) use personas for?
3. Do you also need buyer personas?
4. What is the scope of your personas’ influences?
Here in this article, we are going to discuss the 3 types of personas and 4 different perspectives of personas which you want to be aware of when creating personas. Think through these questions before hand and they will help you decide what research methods you should utilize and how much time and resources you will need to complete the persona project.
Here are the next two questions to answer for yourself:
5. What types of persona do you need?
There are 3 types of personas that you could create and each of them requires different research methods, depending on what kind of data you need or how much time and money you want to (or can) invest: Ad-Hoc personas (or Proto personas), Qualitative personas, and Statistical personas.
Each of these types have its pros and cons. Before deciding to approach the research with either type, you also want to figure out the pros and cons, and what situations your personas will be applied.
1. Ad-Hoc personas (or Proto personas)
Ad-Hoc personas are mainly created when the team can’t afford the cost to do the research or when there is a need to quickly align the key stakeholders’ views, based only on the existing data and team’s existing knowledge (or best guesses). The team usually gets together for a quick brainstorming session where everybody creates a set of personas based on his/her understanding of the user’s needs. And then, the team combines and edits the sets and narrows them into a smaller set.
This type of persona lacks background research and study. But it helps the team to align the different assumptions and move the projects forward with a shared direction.
2. Qualitative personas
Qualitative personas requires research such as user interviews, usability testing, or field studies. It is used to discover new ideas and previously unknown user problems with a small sample size. This type of personas often fit best for most teams as it’s very valuable at uncovering insights and revealing things that that the team didn’t know and could later test or prove.
However, the biggest con of this type of personas is that there’s no quantitative evidence due to its small-sample size. The risk of being wrong is high and there is no way to determine the proportion of your user population that each persona represents.
3. Statistical personas
Statistical persona is the qualitative personas with quantitative validation. It is a mix of qualitative and quantitative research.
After conducting qualitative research, you could invest more time and effort by segmenting users based on your previous qualitative research’s particular user goals and behaviors. Test the segmentation through quantitative research, such as a survey instrument to gather a large sample size. And then categorize the data to find patterns with statistical analysis. As quantitative data reduces the chance you’re wrong, it’s valuable to provide evidence of the magnitude and importance of a particular issue.
After you conduct quantitative research, your personas are more realistic and have statistical significance. They are no longer fictional creations.
6. What perspectives of personas would suit your purpose more?
In Lene Nielsen’s “Personas,” she summarized 4 different perspectives of personas from different industry professionals. Except for the fictional perspective which does not emerge from user research data, the rest of 3 agrees that the persona descriptions should be founded on data:
1. the fictional personas
This was what we discussed earlier — Ad-Hoc Personas which don’t include research data. It is created from stakeholders’ intuitions and assumptions based on the past and current knowledge of what typical users look like. Like an initial sketch, it could be improved by validating with real users later on.
2. the goal-directed personas
The main focus of the goal-directed personas is on what a typical user wants to do with your product. To understand and examine the workflow that a typical user prefers to utilize to achieve the goals when being on your product.
To gather the data to build the goal-directed personas, the team needs to conduct qualitative research. According to Lene Neilsen’s article, Ethnographic Research is a good starting point to gather data as it combines immersive observation and directed interview techniques. And this is the key phase to build the goal-directed personas.
3. the role-based personas
The role-based personas push the goal-directed personas a step further and provide clarity and consistency in the user descriptions. They focus on not only user goals but also user behaviors and their roles in the organization. This requires massive data from both qualitative and quantitative research.
With better understanding of users’ roles in the organization — the tasks each role performs, the touch points between different roles, and the overall flow of the work — the team will be able to make better design decisions.
4. the engaging personas
The purpose of engaging personas is to create stories around them to engage their readers, so that they are relevant to the readers’ tasks at hand. This also requires massive amounts of data from both qualitative and quantitative research. Furthermore, in the engaging perspective, the data and description will also include the emotions of the user, the psychological status, as well as the social background. This way the team could bring the personas to life and when empathy on personas is evoked, we are in better position of making decisions.
There are many resources on how to make personas with detailed steps and guidance. Before diving into the how, understand the why and the context of when and where your personas are going to be used. This will help you clear the thoughts and create a set of personas that are useful and align with the team’s goals.
