Tool
Personas field work For a new project, don’t recycle a persona from a previous project. Interview and create a new persona every new project.
STEP 1 | Define the Problem Describe the problem that, through personas, needs to be solved as clearly as possible. It may be tempting, but try to avoid general statements.
STEP 2 | Define the Audience Identify the people you need to study in order to understand the problem you defined. To achieve a good persona practices development, it is important, when seasonable, spend some quality time with current or potentials customers. To plan this, market research audience can be derived from target market information that companies have. Costumer segmentation models can also help refine the selection process. When planing the audience, there should be at least one persona to represent each major segment of your users.
STEP 3 | Research the Audience The purpose of the research is to identify trends or patterns in user behaviors, expectations and motivations to form the basis of the personas. So, you must get into the field and meet real users that you identified previously. Conduct research interviews, observations and listening to groups of potential user and/or costumers. Observe the environment in which they would use your product or service. Get hold of as much knowledge of the users as possible. The data can originate from several sources: interviews, observations, second hand information, questionnaires, reports, cultural probes etc. According to Calabria (2004), there are three main ways to produce meaningful research interviews for personas: FIRST | Interview business stakeholders. These people have had hundreds if not thousands of interactions with end users and are already conscious of users’ behavioral patterns. Respect the wealth of knowledge your business stakeholders hold and get them involved early on in the persona research.
Design Thinking Tools by Joana Cerejo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://creativityissues.com