1.3 User Personas

Question 1

What are effective user personas and user stories based on?

Answer 1

Effective user personas + user stories are based on goals and needs of users

Question 2

What gives you key insights regarding the direction you should take with your project?

Answer 2

The direction of a project is given by the insights from competitor research and analysis, and observational data from user interviews.

Question 3

What is the conceptualisation phase of the design thinking process?

Answer 3

Where you take your inspirations and turn them into full-fledged ideas for your product

Question 4

What do you start with?

Answer 4

You start with “POV” (point of view)

Question 5

Why do you start with this?

Answer 5

To look even more deeply into users’ point of view to increase our understanding of it.

Question 6

How do you better understand a user’s point of view?

Answer 6

By creating user personas.

Question 7

What is a user persona?

Answer 7

It’s a way of humanising potential users and highlighting their goals and behaviours. A user persona is a representation of the goals, pain points, and behaviours of a hypothesised subset of users.

Question 8

Why do you this?

Answer 8

By bringing your customers’ perspectives to the forefront, you can give meaning to research, which will, in turn, lead to more concrete ideas and strategies.

Question 9

How does it do this?

Answer 9

Personas help you hypothesise clear actions your users might take while using your product or service.

Question 10

What are proto-personas?

Answer 10

A more basic version of the person to save time

Question 11

What does a proto-persona enable you to do?

Answer 11

Helps you craft meaningful user stories, problem statements, and hypotheses (for use during the ideation phase further along in the design thinking) process

Question 12

What are personas are informed by?

Answer 12

Personas are informed by research, typically through exploratory user interviews at the beginning of a project, and continuously refined based on your users’ actual behaviours when interacting with your product or service.

Question 13

Don’t you find it strange that the only person not present at company meetings is the person you’re designing for? This is where personas come in. Personas are a powerful tool for…

Answer 13

…internal alignment to reconcile business, technical, and design capacities.

Question 14

What do persona help designers and businesses maintain focus on?

Answer 14

They help designers and businesses maintain focus on their customers rather than their internal agendas.

Question 15

What is the ultimate goal of a user persona?

Answer 15

The ultimate goal of a persona is to generate empathy for your potential users—those for whom you’re designing

Question 16

What do we achieve by bringing these groups of customers to life in the form of an archetype?

Answer 16

We humanise them, empathise with them, and ultimately, create better designs for them. We give them faces and names, allowing us to refer to them naturally—and prioritise their needs—when making design decisions

Question 17

When making design decisions how does the archetype help us?

Answer 17

We give them faces and names, allowing us to refer to them naturally—and prioritise their needs–when making design decisions.

Question 18

For larger complex projects, you may have more than one persona. In these cases, you should try and focus on the persona with the greatest impact on the project. This persona is commonly referred to…

Answer 18

The Primary Persona

Question 19

What elements make up a primary persona?

Answer 19

Name and face. Give your persona a name and face. You can either sketch out a character or find a convincing photograph.

Demographic information. Outline your persona’s location, age range, education, ethnicity, family status, and job titles.

Needs and goals. Identify goals and tasks your persona will want to achieve using your product or service.

Behaviours. Take notes on your persona’s current behaviours or feelings towards your product, service, or industry.
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