Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognise that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.
As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice within many human centred design disciplines to collate research and personify certain trends and patterns in the data as personas. Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on real data collected from multiple individuals. Personas add the human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in your research. When you create persona profiles of typical or atypical (extreme) users, it will help you to understand patterns in your research, which synthesises the types of people you seek to design for. Personas are also known as model characters or composite characters.
Persona 1 and 2 are far different than 3 and 4. 3 was essentially a soft reboot of the entire series and where it really took off. Persona 2 in particular has a cult following for being very good but also divisive. Persona 1 hasn't aged well at all in its systems and mechanics. I personally think that Persona 2 is, and Persona 1 isn't. Persona 1 is a first-person dungeon crawler, similar to the earlier SMT games. While that's all well and good, the combat system is an extremely clunky hybrid of a traditional RPG and a strategy RPG.
Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design development against. Constructing personas will help you ask the right questions and answer those questions in line with the users you are designing for. For example, “How would Peter, Joe, and Jessica experience, react, and behave in relation to feature X or change Y within the given context?” and “What do Peter, Joe, and Jessica think, feel, do and say?” and “What are their underlying needs we are trying to fulfill?”
Personas in Design Thinking
In the Design Thinking process, designers will often start creating personas during the second phase, the Define phase. In the Define phase, Design Thinkers synthesise their research and findings from the very first phase, the Empathise phase. Using personas is just one method, among others, that can help designers move on to the third phase, the Ideation phase. The personas will be used as a guide for ideation sessions such as Brainstorm, Worst Possible Idea and SCAMPER.
Four Different Perspectives on Personas
In her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas, Ph.D and specialist in personas, Lene Nielsen, describes four perspectives that your personas can take to ensure that they add the most value to your design project and the fiction-based perspective. Let’s take a look at each of them:
1. Goal-directed Personas
This persona cuts straight to the nitty-gritty. “It focusses on: What does my typical user want to do with my product?”. The objective of a goal-directed persona is to examine the process and workflow that your user would prefer to utilise in order to achieve their objectives in interacting with your product or service. There is an implicit assumption that you have already done enough user research to recognise that your product has value to the user, and that by examining their goals, you can bring their requirements to life. The goal-directed personas are based upon the perspectives of Alan Cooper, an American software designer and programmer who is widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic”. Wondershare pdf editor 5 5 3.
Author/Copyright holder: Smashing Magazine. Copyright terms and licence: All rights reserved. Img Source
2. Role-Based Personas
The role-based perspective is also goal-directed and it also focusses on behaviour. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively in the copyright terms.
Lene Nielsen’s poster covers the 10step process to creating engaging personas which participants are the most likely to find relevant and useful in their design process and as a base for their ideation processes.
You can download and print the “Engaging Persona” template which you and your team can use as a guide:
Get your free template for “Engaging Personas”
Example of How to Make a Persona Description – Step 5
Author/Copyright holder: phot0geek. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 2.0
We will let you in on the details about our persona’s education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and patterns of behaviour. We’ve added a few fictional personal details to make our persona a realistic character and given her a name.
Hard Facts
Christie is living in a small apartment in Toronto, Canada. She’s 23 years old, single, studies ethnography, and works as a waiter during her free time.
Interests and Values
Christie loves to travel and experience other cultures. She recently spent her summer holiday working as a volunteer in Rwanda.
She loves to read books at home at night as opposed to going out to bars. She does like to hang out with a small group of friends at home or at quiet coffee shops. She doesn’t care too much about looks and fashion. What matters to her is values and motivations.
In an average day, she tends to drink many cups of tea, and she usually cooks her own healthy dishes. She prefers organic food, however, she’s not always able to afford it.
Computer, Internet and TV Use
Christie owns a MacBook Air, an iPad and an iPhone. She uses the internet for her studies to conduct the majority of her preliminary research and studies user reviews to help her decide upon which books to read and buy. Christie also streams all of her music and she watches movies online since she does not want to own a TV. She thinks TV’s are outdated and she does not want to waste her time watching TV shows, entertainment, documentaries, or news which she has not chosen and finds 100 % interesting herself.
A Typical Day
- Christie gets up at 7 am. She eats breakfast at home and leaves for university at 8.15 every morning.
- Depending on her schedule, she studies by herself or attends a class. She has 15 hours of classes at Masters level every week, and she studies for 20 hours on her own.
- She eats her lunch with a study friend or a small group.
- She continues to study.
- She leaves for home at 3pm. Sometimes she continue to study 2-3 hours at home.
- Three nights a week she works as a waitress at a small eco-restaurant from 6pm to 10pm.
Future Goals
Christie dreams of a future where she can combine work and travel. She wants to work in a third world country helping others who have not had the same luck of being born into a wealthy society. She’s not sure about having kids and a husband. At least it’s not on her radar just yet.
Know Your History
The method of developing personas stems from IT system development during the late 1990s where researchers had begun reflecting on how you could best communicate an understanding of the users. Various concepts emerged, such as user archetypes, user models, lifestyle snapshots, and model users. In 1999, Alan Cooper published his successful book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, where he, as the first person ever, described personas as a method we can use to describe fictitious users. There are a vast number of articles and books about personas, however a unified understanding of one single way to apply the method doesn’t exist, nor does a definition of what a persona description should contain exactly.
The Take Away
Personas are fictional characters. You create personas based on your research to help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviours and goals. Creating personas will help you identify with and understand the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they will guide your ideation processes, and they will help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group. Engaging personas emphasise how stories can engage and bring the personas to life. The 10-step process covers the entire process from the preliminary data collection, through active use, to continued development of personas.
References & Where to Learn More
Course: The Practical Guide to Usability:
https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/the-practical-guide-to-usability
https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/the-practical-guide-to-usability
Nielsen, Lene, Personas. In: Soegaard, Mads and Dam, Rikke Friis (eds.). The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, 2nd Ed. Aarhus, Denmark: The Interaction Design Foundation, 2013:
https://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html
https://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/personas.html
Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, 1999
Personas can be used in conjunction with empathy mapping to provide a snapshot of a Persona’s experience as described in a Persona Empathy Mapping article by Nikki Knox on the Cooper.com Design & Strategy Agency’s Journal.
Atlanta based Photographer Jason Travis has created a series of Persona Portraits with their artifacts which illustrates the power of visually representing archetypal users, customers or personalities.
Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: Teo Yu Siang and Interaction Design Foundation. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0
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Go look at your library of writing tools. What do you see? Products to help create a story outline, a place to compile research, a dictionary app, spellchecking, and more. But what about your characters? It’s time to meet Persona.
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Description
What is Persona?
Go look at your library of writing tools. What do you see? Products to help create a story outline, a place to compile research, a dictionary app, spellchecking, and more. But what about your characters? What do you use to develop them, or do you just sort of, you know, let them evolve? Welcome to Persona. No matter if you’re a Mac or a Win user, Persona will help you create the strongest character possible.
Get inside your character’s head – with your Mac or PC.
Packed inside Persona are archetypal themes—good guys and bad guys. These archetypes are described in detail: personality traits, qualities, flaws, background, occupations, and how they interact with other personalities. Whether your character is a brainiac talking fish or an outcast orphanage owner, Persona helps you explore how each one’s unique psychology and background influence their dealings and dialogue. We’ve even made it possible for you to see what happens if your character becomes corrupt and turns from hero and heroine into villain or villainess.
Develop your characters; strengthen your story
The archetypes in Persona consist of 16 male and 16 female personalities, each group broken down into heroes, heroines, villains and villainesses. There’s the Action Figure, who will get the job done no matter the cost, or the Companion, a caring and selfless man. When the Action Figure loses his moral compass, he turns into the Brute, ruthless and argumentative, easily despised. The Companion, when depraved, becomes the Opportunist, betraying trust and taking advantage of others. Then there’s the Caregiver, empathic and nurturing, but when corrupted she becomes the Distracted Mother, antagonistic and disinterested.
![Persona 1 2 Persona 1 2](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/55/Carisa_Hendrix_as_Lucy.jpg/1200px-Carisa_Hendrix_as_Lucy.jpg)
How’s that to get your creativity revved?
I really like this software. It’s simple to use and it has a great deal of archetypes to use. Of course this shouldn’t be the only thing you use to create a character, but what I’ve found to be helpful is that it generates ideas. When I started my character profiles I got so many ideas of what I wanted to do with them. It can be easy to think that you’ll be held in a box by this software. I don’t feel that way.
CT33Persona user
We’ve made it simple.
Don’t be fooled by Persona’s spartan looks. Both the Mac and Windows version is designed to keep you focused on the task of developing your character. You can create Smart Groups based on attributes like tags, type, sex, or any word or phrase from your notes. If you’re not sure how your characters will fit together, you can construct ad hoc groups of characters without a defined relationship, in order to explore interactions. We’ve included a Names database with over 16,000 names and their origins that you can select from, or you can add your own.
![Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers](https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aGjQ8vX_460s.jpg)
Choices. We like them.
We understand that a lot of writers do want to have their characters develop, “on the fly,” but we believe that a writer should have the opportunity to choose their approach to character development. That’s why we have added Persona for Mac and Persona for Windows to our creative writing product line. Creating a compelling, empathic, and believable character in a story doesn’t have to be something left to chance – with Persona, the choice is up to you.
The was a time earlier in my writing career that I really didn’t care how my characters evolved throughout my story. Mistake. Persona is a drop-dead simple way of making sure each character in my story is as accurate as can be. If you write, you need this app.
Dave WinstonPersona user
Persona – System requirements
macOS: Mac OS 10.7 or newer. Catalina supported.Windows: Windows 8 or newer.