Using user interviews to create "personas"
Personas, are nowadays, everywhere. But how do you go about creating one?
What is a Persona?
Persona is a set of descriptive information to help guide decision-makers in building products for your intended user based on user needs, motivations, and pain points. It is a document created after synthesizing qualitative user research, typically conductive via user interviews or ethnographic studies (e.g., user observations, video recordings, diary analysis, etc.).
What isn’t a Persona?
Personas can often be confused with marketing segmentation or user archetypes. This is because there is no agreed upon definition for each term, how each should be created, and when they should be used.
Marketing segmentation. Marketing segmentation is to identify buyers of your product, primarily based on quantitative research. Let’s take a B2B enterprise software product as an example. The market segmentation may identify target buyers as telecommunications companies with revenues between $10-20 MM, who are contemplating system migrations. However, this information doesn’t address the user needs (workers within telecommunication companies) to help guide product development decision-making.
Brand/marketing or user archetypes. User archetype helps identify underlying psychological traits common across a group of individuals for branding or inspirational product differentiation (e.g., non-functional differentiation). An example below describes the underlying reasons behind why a type of user does what he/she does.
User Archetype Example
How to create a Persona based on user interviews?
Collect data via interviews. See “Conducting "customer interviews" to find your first customers for your envisioned product”
Review data and determine how many personas you want to create. I recommend starting with 3 and designate one of your persona as your primary user.
Fill out Persona. See Persona Sample Template
Principles when creating a Persona
Information presented must be supported by facts, not just guesses, assumptions, or wishes.
While personas are often presented visually, don’t get caught in being pretty for the sake of beauty.
For biographic info, it’s better to use either an actual user you’ve interviewed that best represents the persons rather than an amalgamated biography from several users.
If you have to “make something up” , note it.
Research Sources