1. Conduct research
The first step is to conduct user research to understand the target audience’s mindsets, motivations and behaviours.
For an existing product, this might involve observing or talking with current users about both their problems and positive experiences using your product. For a new or existing product, you could do user research with people who are roughly like your prospective users in order to understand their needs.
In-depth user interviews are the most common form of qualitative research. More extensive research can include field studies, observing users’ behaviour and asking them about their goals and attitudes. In addition, you can do usability testing to observe user behaviours.
2. Identify the behavioural variables
When analysing the research, the goal is to find patterns that enable you to group similar people together into types of users, by identifying behavioural variables. Behaviour variables are aspects of behaviour and attitude that differ between participants. Task frequency, mental models, and goals are all common types of variables.
When conducting research it is good to start with some key variables to ask questions about, and then add to these based on the insights that come of the interviews.
Behavioural variables identified in post-it notes.
How behavioural variables can look in polished documentation.
3. Cluster the behaviours
Once you’ve identified a list of behavioural variables they can be laid out on a set of sliders, with opposing behaviours placed on either end. Go through the research notes and mark out where each participant would sit on each slider based on their responses. This will normally result clusters of participants developing at different points along the sliders.
Research participants (A,B,C…) mapped out on behavioural variables.
4. Identity trends
Analyse the grouping of the behaviours across on the sliders, identifying trends where the same participants are grouped together across multiple variables. These grouping trends across all the sliders will then form the basis of each persona.
The numbers of participants in your research will have direct result on how clear the trends become. The more participants you include, the larger the clusters will become, making each trend stronger.
Behavioural variables with participants trends identified.
5. Create a persona for each of the trends
Add personal details to create a realistic picture of a user, focusing on specific user needs. Note down tasks that persona is most likely to perform and how they would approach them. Think about how the attributes in the clusters influence user behaviour.
6. Prioritise personas
Prioritize the personas on the basis of business needs. The idea is to ensure that the primary persona you use during design is a clear and correct representation of your primary user population, not an edge case.
7. Create scenarios and tell stories
Take the key tasks that your product supports and then create the scenario that your personas would likely be in when they engage in these tasks. Tell a story to describe how each persona would be thinking and how they would behave in the situation.
Storytelling narratives are a powerful communication tool that can be used to create empathy with your users and what they would be going through.
8. Create persona documentation
When writing personas, include the following information:
- Name and a picture of the persona (this allows them to be easily identified)
- Any relevant demographic description
- Goals
- Needs
- Behaviours
- Abilities
A basic persona template
These are some examples of what the polished documents can look like:
Examples of polished persona documents
Pictures for each persona can be sourced from the web easily enough (Google images, Flickr, Getty images).
You should avoid using real names or details, whether from your research participants or people you know. This can either cause issues with the confidentially of your research participants, or just simply bias/taint the objectivity of your personas based on team members own personal opinions.
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I have to make persona template to research our user for HED's project.
The surprising thing is create a persona in the middle of time.
Before searching this steps I thought that the first thing we have to start is making persona.
To conduct user research, we have to conduct overall research and identify user's behaviours.
And after doing some research, we can make persona based on information. the another astonishing thing is making scenarios and story telling is almost final step. wow..
