Persona Creation

Personas are fictitious characters that are created to represent the different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a web site. They act as 'stand-ins' for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design.

Benefits of this service

Personas are useful in helping to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design that meets the users' needs.

Advantages

• Users' goals and needs become a common point of focus for the team
• They are relatively quick to develop and replace the need to canvass the whole user community
• Design efforts can be prioritised based on the personas
• Disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas

Disadvantages

• Personas are fictional and therefore there is no clear way to determine how many users are represented by any given persona

The approach

We would typically work with you to create 6 Personas that are representative of your users after categorising data from user research.

The process

We work with you to research the information to include on Personas. The types of things we look for:

• Personal information, such as age, gender and location
• Technical information like what kind of computer and browser they use, how and why they use the web, and how often
• Their relationship to your company
• How they view your site, or potential site, as well as those of your competitors
• What they like in a web site and what they don't

The deliverables

We would typically look to deliver the following to your organisation as part of the persona creation usability sessions that we run.

Personas - approximately 6 individual personas you can use within your organisation.

Presentation - an oral presentation communicating the most important findings and recommendations.

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