Using proto-personas to benchmark your team’s understanding
Whether you’re starting a project or are in the middle of one have you ever thought to yourself “who are we designing this for again”?
Sometimes we can get lost in the day-to-day cycle of project delivery but for a project to be a success, we must make sure our decisions are based on the needs of the user.
So what do you do when you’re unsure who your users are or you don’t have the time or budget for an extensive discovery to gather data to identify your target audience?
At Valtech, we use the proto-persona workshop to help define what the business currently knows about its users while also allowing us to gain an understanding of the client, the project and the needs of the users.
Creating proto-personas is a great way to get buy-in from senior stakeholders and benchmark a company’s current understanding of its users without the initial need to conduct user research.
But what is a persona?
A persona is a fictional character generated to encapsulate the behaviours, needs and demographical information about the target audience. These audience archetypes are identified and developed based on combining various user research methods and market analysis.
What makes proto-personas different from traditional personas is that they are based on the domain expertise, opinion and assumptions of the organisation.
Running a proto-persona workshop can be beneficial regardless of what stage of a project you’re at and it’s something you can do tomorrow.
How can you hold this workshop tomorrow?
So you’re considering running a proto-persona workshop, the great thing about this kind of session is it has little cost except for people’s time and is a good team exercise for alignment of opinions and assumptions.
Here’s a list of the things you’ll need to be successful.
• Plenty of A4 paper,
• Black sharpies or similar pens
• Stakeholders and team members
• Judgment free zone
• 3–4 hours depending on size of group
If you’re wondering who should be in the room. You will want as many different team members and stakeholders as you can round up that are involved in delivering or have an impact on decisions about the product or service.
Now you’re ready to begin, start by collectively brainstorming as a team who your potential users may be.
Once identified, give the team 30 minutes to create as many unique personas as they can, or that they feel are necessary.
A proto-persona is broken up into four segments:
1. A sketch of the user and their name
2. Demographic information
3. Their needs and pain points
4. Potential ideas and solutions
When everyone has finished creating their personas, each member of the team presents their personas to the rest of the workshop by reading aloud each one explaining their assumptions and why they believe them to be true.
This is the opportunity for the team to ask questions about the characteristics and details of a persona while giving feedback using positive judgement.
At this point, the team can make any changes or identify the most important qualities that they believe to be realistic.
Once everyone has had the chance to present you may feel the need to either have time discussing the results and either combine and produce a version one for each user identified or close the workshop and create them yourself depending on the availability of the team.
Closing the workshop
This is the perfect opportunity to thank the team for their attendance and support while also reiterating that their proto-personas are based on assumptions and their current understanding. This collection of beliefs will help to shape recruitment for research and will be iterated and validated through user research and will help the team to make design decisions based on the needs of the user.
Next steps: Validating through user research
You’ve held your workshop and now have a collection of proto-personas containing assumed needs and pain points of the target audience. We treat these artefacts as living documents, meaning that they can be edited as the teams understanding grows through research. Conducting a variety of research methods will help you in either supporting or replacing assumptions with verified analysis based on the target audience.
Conclusion
Running a proto-persona workshop has two useful outcomes. Firstly it allows you to understand what senior stakeholders and the team knows or understands the needs and goals of their target audience.
Secondly, it helps align their focus onto users putting them and their needs at the forefront of any strategic or design decision that may impact their experience.
Don’t forget this workshop can be run at any stage of a project regardless of product maturity.
Let me know in the comments how you get on or what your experiences are of running the workshop.
