The Persona Canvas
The Persona Canvas: Examples
A step-by-step example of creating customer personas
Understanding your customer is a vital part of innovation. Perhaps it is even the most important part. If you don’t really understand what is the problem that you want to solve, and if you don’t know what having that problem really means to the people that have it on a daily basis, you run the risk of creating a solution nobody needs.
For me, understanding the customer means creating personas. The reason I do that is that it is much easier to have intuitions about what a group of people may need when there is a person to empathise with. A persona is a shortcut to focus that empathy. For me, when I see statistics and interview results without the focus of a persona it is very difficult to empathise and therefore to have intuitions.
Of course, there is a danger in doing this: you’re empathising with a fake person, a construct. In a way, you run the risk of empathising with your own bias. To make sure this risk is minimised, you need to validate any personas you create in the real world.
The Persona Canvas
When creating personas, it helps to use some kind of format to help integrate the information in a concise overview. The Persona Canvas does just that. But an empty canvas can tell you only so much, examples are way better!
In this post, I want to take you through the most important steps in the process I use when construct personas.
Step 1. Define your goal.
For this example, I was mapping a target audience of innovation professionals. Think innovation managers, product owners, scrum masters, and so on. The goal I defined was that I wanted to understand what the different needs for members of the audience were in terms of innovation related tools. What are they using, what are they doing with these tools, and so on.
Step 2. Gather data.
The first thing to do is to start to understand the audience by getting data. How many people are in the audience? What are their roles? What do they do all day? What are important sentiments and issues? To understand this, I interviewed a few (8) people that work in this space from my own network.
The fact that this first contact is with such a small group means that you won’t gather much significant data at this stage. That is not a problem however. This first iteration with interviews is just to get a baseline, an initial hunch. Based on this, it becomes easier to highlight your own biases and it also becomes clearer where you need to look for more and better data.
It’s better test your questions first before you send them to your 50 most critical contacts with a glaring mistake on the front page!
Besides, doing interviews first with a few (friendly) people means that you have a chance of ironing out any kinks you may have had in your questions. The people you’re talking to know the space better than you, so they will be able to help you improve your approach. In my case they definitely showed me some blind spots right away!
Besides interview data, I also looked at statistical data, forums and linked in posts, and research done by other people.
Step 3. Processing and clustering your data.
Next, I plotted all the information I gathered on a wall with post-its. I usually split them in a few categories to make it easier to deal with all the different things people say during interviews. I created the Experiment Results canvas to make it easier to process interview or research results in a workshop setting.
The first thing is to look at the exact quotes and stories people have. Map these out for different interviews.
Then, look for the respondent describing what they perceive to be the problem. Often they will do this in the form of opinions or assumptions.
Next, look at their perceived needs. They will tell you what they think they need — and they may do that in the form of volunteered solutions: how they see the solution to the problem.
Finally, look in their statements for descriptions of actual behaviour. What are the solutions they already use? When and how often have they experienced the problem?
(Note: The Experiment Results canvas has more space at the bottom, but when you’re creating personas these are not super relevant. )
To cluster the results of the interviews, I wanted to create a simple 2x2 grid. Although the choice of dimensions will have a lot of impact, it makes it much more easy to see groupings, or the absence thereof.
My choice of dimensions was based on the initial interview data, as it struck me there were some people that were clearly looking at the process, and focusing on specialist aspects, and other people that looked at the entire innovation project.
When plotting the interviews in this grid it seemed that there might be some clusters to define personas for, and validate. It also became clear that there is a lot of area that is not covered by the initial interviews. Perhaps the respondents were too similar in their age, professional outlook, or place in the pecking order.
It is vital to keep in mind that this first pass is very much a reflection of your own bias, and to use it to guide you away from what you already think you know.
Step 4 and 5. Define the personas and make a rich picture
I defined two personas and filled a Persona Canvas for each. The results can be found below.
Persona 1: Colin, the innovation manager.
Colin wants to start his own startup, but works as an innovation manager at a large bank. He wants to learn as much as possible and build his skills and network before starting his own startup. He is focused on the end result and looks at the bigger picture.
Persona 2: Nadia, the innovation specialist.
Nadia is much more involved with detailed work within innovation projects, in her case running experiments. She is more concerned about being able to do a great job, and focused on the process itself rather than the outcome as a whole.
Of course there are many more personas that can be relevant in this space, but I hope showing this example helps people to make more effective use of the persona canvas.
Want more?
If you want to know more about practical ways to use the Persona Canvas, have a look at the Tool Guide for the Persona Canvas 🚀
Happy experimenting!
