In her Interaction Design Foundation encyclopedia article, Personas, Ph.D. The personas will be used as a guide for ideation sessions such as Brainstorm, Worst Possible Idea and SCAMPER. Using personas is just one method, among others, that can help designers move on to the third phase, the Ideation phase. In the Define phase, Design Thinkers synthesize their research and findings from the very first phase, the Empathise phase. In the design thinking process, designers will often start creating personas during the second phase, the Define phase.

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 Constructing personas will help you ask the right questions and answer those questions in line with the users you are designing for. Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design development against. Personas are also known as model characters or composite characters. Creating persona profiles of typical or atypical (extreme) users will help you understand patterns in your research, which synthesizes the types of people you seek to design for. Personas add the human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in your research. Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on actual data collected from multiple individuals.

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.Īs opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice within many human-centered design disciplines to collate research and personify specific trends and patterns in the data as personas. It can help you recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you identify with the user you’re designing for. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.

Persona definition