Hi, its me again.. have you ever wanted to understand patterns in behaviour of buyers of a product? are you looking to innovate (something new) or to improve an existing service?

Applying personas to design thinking process will help you take a step back and build empathy with users, helping  you to properly listen and walk in their shoes.

Personas are “not real people or average users but user models described in detail to have the key attributes, needs, values, lifestyle, culture and personal background of the group they represent” (Giulia Piu).

Alice Comi a Lecturer in Business Design in the School of Strategy, Marketing and Innovation at Kingston Business School, London categorically stated that ” Personas are not specific users but rather ideal types that are built upon observation of multiple users.” 

A persona shows attitude, behaviour, emotions and anything that will give more context to understand the personas behaviour.

“Personas were informally developed by Alan Cooper in the early ’80s as a way to empathize with and internalise the mindset of people who would eventually use the software he was designing.”

How Are Personas Created?

Personas can be created in a myriad of ways, This includes;

• Interview and/or observe an adequate number of people.
• Find patterns in the interviewees’ responses and actions, and use those to group similar people together.
• Create archetypical models of those groups, based on the patterns found.
• Drawing from that understanding of users and the model of that understanding, create user-centered designs.

Conclusion

Designers don’t always know what is best — but sometimes users do and that is what personas are for: to stand up and represent real users, since real users can’t be there when the design process takes place.

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Additional Resources

• Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services, Kim Goodwin
• The Essential Persona Lifecycle: Your Guide to Building and Using Personas, Tamara Adlin and John Pruitt
• The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web, Steve Mulder
• Personas and the Advantage of Designing for Yourself,” Joshua Porter
• “Personas: Practice and Theory” (PDF), John Pruitt and Jonathan Grudin, Microsoft
• The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
• “Losing Yourself in a Fictional Character Can Affect Your Real Life,” Jeff Grabmeier, Ohio State University
• “Real or Imaginary: The Effectiveness of Using Personas in Product Design,” Frank Long, Frontend
• “The Personas’ New Clothes: Methodological and Practical Arguments Against a Popular Method” (PDF), Christopher N. Chapman and Russell P. Milham, Microsoft
• “Putting Personas Under the Microscope,” Suzy Thompson, Cooper Journal
• “Quantitative Evaluation of Personas as Information” (PDF), Christopher N. Chapman