Persona Development
Personas help you live in your users’ shoes. A persona is a fictional character who represents the goals and behaviours of a whole range of real users. By putting a face and a name to the disconnected bits of data from other user research activities, personas help you keep your users in mind and ensure you design for them.
We base personas on qualitative user interviews, stakeholder workshops and research. Personas give life to a set of user needs, frustrations, and attitudes, so that teams can keep users in the picture when making design decisions. Just like real people, personas evolve and bring value throughout the project lifecycle and beyond.
Benefits
Personas help identify and design the critical features from a user’s point of view. Personas will help you:
- Build empathy for your users.
- Build consensus and commitment. Personas bring your team together with a shared vision of exactly who you’re designing for and what they want.
- Reduce design costs. Early agreement about user needs means less cost later when you make detailed decisions.
- Communicate with stakeholders, developers and other designers.
Typical deliverable
- Personas can take many different forms but the key deliverable is a document that represents the complete information on each persona. This detailed Personas Report will include:
- biographic, geographic, demographic, psychographic background details
- knowledge, proficiency, and expectations of your products and services
- goals, needs and attitudes
- behavioural profiles
- context of usage
- interaction characteristics
- channel preferences
- information characteristics
- brand characteristics and marketing preferences (including the personas’ relationships to you and your products and services)
- business objectives including metrics such as reduced cost to serve and increased client satisfaction.
- Debrief session with stakeholders to present and discuss the personas.
Typical duration
3 - 8 weeks.
Clients
Optimal Usability has developed personas for:
- ACC
- Air New Zealand
- Department of Conservation
- KiwiBank
- Ministry of Economic Development
- Telecom
- Vodafone
