Designing actionable personas

This helps us empathise, but it also helps us unite the stakeholder team behind a single vision of our users and their needs. Managing this change of perspective is one of our main challenges in UX and creating personas is a great tool to help us with this.

Creating personas can be achieved in two ways;

1) By doing upfront research, interviews and observations and then distilling these down into a single persona or a series of personas that will best represent our users.

2) Create a sample persona (or proto-persona) based on our stakeholder teams shared assumptions of who our users are and then subsequently conduct user research to validate our assumptions and refine our persona.

Both approaches work but there are key differences when applying these approaches within enterprise environments.

1) This is the open-minded approach that design thinkers’ favour as it starts with user insight and helps us develop personas that closely resemble real users. This is a great approach where a vision of the user is already defined by strategy and data. Using this data allows us to preselect users for observation and interview and acts as a selection mechanism for our research effort. However, when looking at enterprise products and services that span the whole business, and in the absence of user segmentation data, the researcher is forced to either reach out to everyone in the business (impractical and undesirable in most instances) or make assumptions on user groups (a bad idea as it means any data will be based on assumptions, not facts).

2) The proto-persona approach is part of a Lean UX methodology which is oriented towards enterprise systems. It helps us segment user groups based on stakeholder assumptions, innate organisational understanding of existing users and on defined job roles within an organisation. This preselection allows us to generate proto-personas that reflect these assumptions and helps us focus our research efforts and resources more accurately and effectively. These personas are then validated against real user feedback and updated in an iterative way.

One of the key advantages of the second approach is it gets stakeholder buy in at an early stage and it helps create momentum in the project which is then carried over into the ideation and prototyping phase. User research and validation can then follow as we fine tune both our assumptions of the end user and the product or services that will meet their needs best. It can also help us map our real users to our user assumptions and define our empathy work and behavioural research.

In conclusion, from the perspective of stakeholders, user research can sometimes be viewed as a speed hump in a project timeline. There will be more of an appetite to get stuck in with assumptions and validate them later and therefore proto-personas are often a pragmatic way of getting velocity and engagement dialed in from day one.

Finally, if proto-personas are not confused with real personas created from real insight, then this approach will work well in most organisations.