Persona development

Making your users come to life

An example of a high fidelity persona

Personas are documents that demonstrate your different user group’s profiles. A persona represents a set of users that are carrying out the same task or are from the same demographic grouping.

Personas facilitate discussion between stakeholders about their user’s needs. Typically, every team member will have copies of the personas and will refer to them throughout a problem, and ask themselves and other team members about whether or not their product is meeting the users needs: ‘Would Caroline be able to use this?’

Your users are people

TIP: User requirements cxpartners could help you to define and understand your user requirements.Personas help everyone on a team to remember that the users of their products are real individuals who have needs and requirements. The level of fidelity used on a persona will vary. Some are minimal – featuring a name, picture, and rough description of the tasks those users carry out. Richer, more detailed personas may have more in-depth information about the individual, such as background, lifestyle and personal life.

Choose your level of fidelity

An example of a sketched low fidelity persona

cxpartners create personas using a variety of data sources, depending on what we have access to. We frequently develop personas using a combination of a client’s existing demographic information, task modelling results, and user research (such as ethnography). This is then supplemented with our consultants’ extensive experience observing user behaviour in usability research.

The level of detail contained in a persona will be determined by the amount of data we have access to, the way the personas are intended to be used and the nature of the tasks your users will be conducting on the website.

The personas cxpartners produce are often distributed within organisations to help unify teams and aid the user centred design process.

Next steps:
We’d be happy to talk to you about how your team could use personas. Call us on 0117 946 3930 or email info@cxpartners.co.uk.

If you’re interested in how we take a strategic approach to our client’s user experience problems, take a look at how we manage vision development and user requirements.