Persona Template

Definitions

Personas

Personas are models of the people for whom we are solving a problem.

When we are designing, the goal is not to create features, the goal is to make things more accessible for people around us. The degree of success that a product achieves is measured by to what extent it is able to produce a positive outcome for the people we are designing for.

Designers often create imaginary yet realistic and detailed models of the users of a product to represent them. These models called personas.

These are useful as they:

• Provide a basis for design discussion
• Describes who the product is for
• Focus on specific attributes of actual users

Personas are typically research based. But there is another kind of persona: the proto-persona.

Proto-Personas

Proto-personas are assumption based personas; this means that they are typically generated by anecdotal knowledge from Subject Matter Experts or other knowledgeable Stakeholders.

There are a couple of reasons to do proto-personas:

1. The business is not ready to do research-based personas, or
2. A researcher is trying to narrow down the search-space into something workable to do research-based personas.

Template

I have used the template included in this article among other instances as part of the Discovery process in Gavelytics (1), then in the Discovery process in Musica Viva (1), to create ‣ for ‣ (1), and most recently as part of this big Research piece for Carsguide / Autotrader in Australia (2), and it's been really useful. So I hope it will be as useful as it has been for me.

Template Definition

It is fragmented in 4 quadrants with 4 different sections:

• Quadrant 1: Name of the Persona, tagline or catchphrase, and a space to draw the persona
• Quadrant 2: General details
• Quadrant 3: Pain points or frustrations
• Quadrant 4: Goals or objectives

The template is designed to be used during workshops with multiple stakeholders at the time.

This template also has a number field associated with each of the section which represents the suggested order in which is participants in a workshop are more likely to feel comfortable filling it in. First the drawing, second the details, third the pain points or goals, and fourth the name and tagline.

The reason why we do the drawing for the participant to be primed for empathy and to think the back-story of the persona while they are drawing it. This is really useful for filling in the details next.

In my experience, once the back story is done, pain points and goals, take a little more brain power to complete, but it is easier to do once you have framed the context in which they occur (top half of the page).

Last, the name and tagline. People will typically name their creations after the person they used for inspiration, which is easy, but in case they were doing this in a more chaotic/creative way, letting them wrap with the name allows them to think about puns they can use for the name or tagline which can lighten or brighten the dynamics of the workshop or group.

Follow the next prompts to help struggling participants in a workshop to fill in the template.

Name, Tagline and Drawing. Think about:

• How the users dress?
• What things do they take to work?
• What are their common tools?

Details or Back Story. Think about:

• Where they work?
• Do they have access to a computer?
• How tech savvy they are?
• What’s their age group?
• Why do they use this product?

Pain Points or Frustrations. Think about:

• Their frustrations at work?
• What they don’t like and what gets in the way of them accomplishing what they want to get done?

Goals or Objectives. Think about:

• What are their aspirations?
• What do they want done fast?
• What do they want done better?
• How they can further themselves?

Template in Action

In the photos below, you see a filled version of the template being used.

The content that a filled-persona template has should help the designer identify how different stakeholders see personas. Further action is required to reduce all the information into something that all stakeholder agree, for example; if 5 different stakeholders came up with 4 different personas each, then the designer should facilitate the reduction of those 20 proto-personas into a working set that all stakeholders agree (rule of thumb, if you end up with 5 proto-personas might be too much already).

Another way in which the content of these proto-personas template can be used, is to transfer all contextual information, pain-points and goals into sticky notes, and do affinity diagramming with them, which could be later be useful to perform statistically valid research through surveys, and finally through interviews.

Running a workshop with this template

1. Print 4 or 5 pages per stakeholder invited to your workshop (three to four personas, with one or two buffer pages for mistakes).
2. Hand in the templates to the stakeholders.
3. Talk about what success look like at the end of the session. For example:
4. Identify the perceived breakdown of personas for the system at hand
5. Identify recurring persona goals & painpoints themes.
6. Find any potential system blind-spots so that the team can better prioritize changes required.
7. Run through the concepts discussed in the Template Definition above.
8. Ask participants to complete the template with this in mind:
9. All activities are to be completed individually by everyone in the workshop.
10. Reassure participants that there are no right or wrong ideas and that stick figures work for the illustration section.
11. Ask participants to be creative and as thorough as possible.
12. Tell participants how these proto-personas will be used in the future.
13. If a stakeholder spends more than 45 minutes doing 3 to 5 personas, they are taking too long.

Example Templates with Filled in Personas

See the following filled in templates.