Personas

Published on October 5, 2018 by

Themes: , , , , ,

Why:

To create profiles of the potential service users

What:

Personas show the different types of users who will use the new service

Time:

30 Minutes

Materials:

Large paper, visual material (photos, magazines or Internet pictures), markers

How:

In Small Groups

Image courtesy of Service Design Tools, click here to visit

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A Persona is a character which is created to represent user research in an easily understandable way. Each persona should bring together lots of information about similar people into one character that represents a group of users. Personas can include the following useful information: name, age, occupation, where personas live, what personas do in their spare time, what hobbies or interests personas have, what the persona’s needs are, and so on. To make a persona, gather lots of photos and quotes collected from your user research, as well as pictures from magazines or the Internet. Stick or write all of the information on a large piece of paper, using a different sheet of paper for each persona, and give your persona a name to help you remember them.

SEE ALSO

Scenarios, Interview, User Shadowing, User Diaries, Day in the life

EXTRA RESOURCES

  • Personas, Service Design Tools, access at http://www.servicedesigntools.org/tools/40
  • Methods – Persona, Designing with People. Org, access at http://designingwithpeople.rca.ac.uk/methods/persona
  • Cooper, A. (1998) The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, Sams Publishing, Indiana
  • Long, F. (2009) Real or Imaginary: The effectiveness of using personas in product design, in Proceedings of the IES Conference 2009, Dublin
  • Cooper, A., Goodwin, K. (2009) Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-cantered Products and Services, John Wiley and Sons
  • Pruitt, J., Grudin, J. (2003) Personas: Practice and Theory, in Proceedings DUX ’03, New York, USA

 

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