Personas are “hypothetical archetypes of actual users” (Cooper, 1999). Personas are descriptions of fictional characters based on real data and research about an issue or a target. These fictional descriptions can be used throughout the creative process to identify the real user’s needs, aspirations, fears and expectations in order to conceive the best possible experience for them.

The Personas will allow you and your team to:

• Focus on specific users and not on your personal experiences or general cases
• Create a shared understanding of your user that does not build on preconceived ideas but on real data
• Be empathic with your users by creating a long-term engagement with them
• Communicate and share the essence of the user you want to focus on
• Organise and make sense of all the data you have collected through interviews, observation and documentary research

This is a very useful tool for the ideation phase, after having gathered information about your user/customer or potential user/costumer’s behaviours, aspirations and experiences. Your Personas will be the basis to build up Experience Maps or Scenarios

Ideally, you should work on the creation of the Persona with a team.

Preparation: in between 2 to 4 hours

Development: in between 1 to 2 hours

You will need at least:

• 1 A4 per Persona
• Markers

STEP 01: Based on your previous research (interviews with users and stakeholders, observations, shadowing), identify groups of users that have common interests, similar behavioural patterns or service preferences regardless of their demographics. Once you have identified some user groups, take the time with your team to cluster the research insights you have for each of them.

STEP 02: Choose the user group that you would like to characterise and bring to life through your Personas. It is better to have few Personas so the team can keep focused and be very precise when describing them. When it comes to Personas is more about the precision than the quantity. It is estimated that between 3 and 7 Personas is a good number for most projects.

STEP 03: Agree on the elements you want to include in your layout in order to start building your Personas. There are plenty of layouts for developing a Persona; create or choose a layout that helps you and your team to be clear about the needs, aspirations and limitations of the Persona in relationship to the subject/product or service you are working on.

Some of the elements you can find in a Persona, make a choice according to your project:

• Identity: name, photography, an engaging description of their daily life and the things that s/he values the most, key quotes that reflect her/his state of mind and life priorities.

• Behaviours and attitudes towards your subject/product or services: their level of expertise regarding the domain, their expectations and wants (must do) and frustrations or what annoys him/her the most (must never), their fears, beliefs and insecurities.

• Context of use: when, why, with whom and how often do they use some related services or products.

STEP 05: Make a layout with the different key elements you chose. You can create a tailored layout or get inspiration from different

STEP 04: Fill in your layout to create your Personas in an A4 or A3 sheet of paper so every team member can easily see it.

Interviews, Observation, Experience Map, Scenario

Adaptive path’s guide to Experience mapping

Lallemand, C. & Gronier, G. (2016). Méthodes de design UX. Eyrolles