Personas as a Business Tool

Personas are a potent business intelligence tool that are sometimes misunderstood, misconstructed or assumptive. The consequences of rolling out "made up" personas as fact will ensure that any user experience is based around a premise.

Perhaps it's best to start out by defining what a persona is not. The idea that a persona is created by looking at a demographic segment and giving it a veneer of personality

arouses dismay within any self-respecting UX practitioner.

I've seen personas constructed subjectively, outside of UX; hurriedly put together within pitch documents at agencies to demonstrate an awareness of a particular organisation's users.

Having won the pitch, these personas are sometimes not interrogated, but believed by client and agency to be correct. They then get handed to UX designers, who use them to create user journeys.

Another mistake is for an organisation to predefine who they think their personas are and how many there are. This can only result in forced and diluted stereotypes that serve as a kind of pale doppelgänger - or worse, too many personas, many of which are shades of each other.

From a business point of view, this becomes an expensive exercise that only distracts and confuses. Most persona investigation exercises yield around a handful of primaries, the median being around three.

The interesting thing about personas is that you never know what will emerge from your quantitative and qualitative data.

There is something almost magical in the way archetypes emerge from the clusters of attitudes and behaviours of groups of people that you interview.

It is vital that your personas are empirical if you are to develop an insight into designing truly user-centred interfaces. I use a mixture of primary and secondary research, because it's important to validate what you discover through focus groups or interviews against data captured from surveys and the like.

Keeping an Open Mind

Remaining receptive means that you won't influence your subjects, who are often vulnerable to giving what they believe to be the right answer - after all, you are often paying them to participate, and people do like to please!

This predisposition is often seen in user testing, where participants will give glowing reports of their experience on an interface, despite observational evidence to the contrary.

Setting the Criteria

It's important to establish beforehand, however, what you are hoping to achieve from your research.

Are you trying to capture attitudinal data, are you investigating the type of content they would like to receive?

There is a delicate balance between allowing people to wander off into delicious tangents, and bringing them back to the core of what you are trying to investigate. Allowing people to "flow" can often allow for deeper insights that may not have been uncovered within a rigid facilitation framework.

Another thing to watch out for is the group dynamic within focus groups. Some people like to lead, whilst others are passive. Ensure that everyone gets an opportunity to contribute.

It's a good idea to work in a small team when conducting primary research, so that you have several sets of eyes and ears, and can bounce your observations off of each other.

Identifying the Persona

After several focus groups or interviews, patterns begin to emerge.

You notice that people across groups begin to show similar attitudes or needs. Your persona becomes a composite sketch of these findings. While your persona itself is not "real", it has its basis in real people and is used to represent specific user groups.

Persona Sorting

Once you have what you believe are the full set of personas, it's time to discover who your primary personae are. These are the personas that, if you design for them alone, would in some way disenfranchise another persona.

Analysis will reveal who the primary personas, with their distinct needs, tasks, attitudes and importance within the business.

​Your secondary personas will sit beneath, or between your primaries. These are the people whose needs are satisfied by designing for the primaries, but who also have additional, sometimes less important [from the business perspective], needs that can be easily accommodated within the design.

You may find that you have other personas who, while interesting, are not necessarily part of the main audience as defined by the business goals. For example, these might be people who wouldn't use a digital artefact for one reason or another. They help to form the wider picture, and these are your third, or tertiary personas.

They become the voice of the user - a reminder to let go of personal whims or cognitive biases and design authentic user-centred products.

As a business tool, personas can be used across disciplines to enlighten and inform production. The insight that they provide means that a brand is communicating directly with people and not "consumers". It's never a good idea to have a static view on personas - each new project requires new research. If the business proposition changes or grows, new research must be conducted. A new game, a new hand of cards, so to speak.

Since personas are constructed from real people, it's useful to recall focus group participants or interviewees to test and validate as the product is developed.

Having robust, research based personas is a useful reminder to stakeholders, and humanises data.

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