I love using personas for my own products and in my client-facing work. But for quite some time, I was looking for a good template that allows me to effectively capture the relevant information. After experimenting with different approaches, I believe I have come up with a helpful format, which this blog post introduces.
I was recently helping a client with a new product to be developed for an existing market. When the team began sharing all their ideas about features and functionality, my head started to hurt. So I stood up, grabbed a pen, went to the flip chart, and asked: Who do you think are the users of the new product? And what are their main characteristics and their needs? In no time had we come up with preliminary personas: fictional users and customers.
The great thing about personas is that they invite us to view the product from the user’s perspective. This helps us design a product that truly benefits its users. It avoids getting stuck in longwinded discussions about features, features, and more features. It allows us to explore if a feature would actually benefit one of the personas. Think about all the products you have come across where you asked yourself why the product is so difficult to use. Chances are that the people responsible for creating it did not carefully walk in the user’s shoes. Take the struggle I had this morning with our dishwasher: One of the clips that attaches to the tray had come lose. Clipping it back in turned to be fiddly and difficult. The design must have been optimised for production, and not for the user.
Working with personas implies a user-centric approach: We have to put the user first, and build a product that wants to do a great job for the user. As a consequence, the product becomes a means to an end. It exists to serve its users.
There are three pieces of information I have found particularly important when working with personas: First, the persona’s picture and name; second, the relevant characteristics such as demographics, lifestyle, and job-related information: third, the need that the persona has or the problem that the product should solve. I therefore use the following structure to describe a persona:
The first two sections in the template above describe who the persona is. The last one is particularly important, as it makes us ask why the persona would want to purchase or use our product: The needs are often more important to develop a great product than the demographics.
Here is an example of how the template can be applied. It features a persona of a new book I have recently started to work on:
Notice that I have tried to make the persona description as relevant as possible. I have left out information that is not essential to understand who the character is and why the person would want to read the book. For instance, I decided not to include Peter’s marital status. At the same time, I have tried to be as specific as I can right now about the persona, so I can validate my assumptions. As I find out more about the target readers of the book, I will undoubtedly iterate over Peter’s description, and update it. While refining your persona, ensure that the character is believable and that its description allows you to develop empathy for it. You can do this, for instance, by adding pictures, likes and dislikes to the characteristics.
I prefer to capture personas on paper, so I can easily visualise them by pinning them on my Product Canvas, as the picture below illustrates. An A4 or A3 sized paper sheet usually does the job.
Another advantage of using paper-based personas is the limited space available. This helps us focus on the relevant information rather than writing everything down we believe to know about the user.
Personas are a great technique to capture information about users and customers. They help create a product that serves its user. Employing the persona template introduced in this post helps us capture the relevant information and focuses our effort. With preliminary personas in place, we can start to explore how the needs can be best addressed, create a first prototype, and test our assumptions. I will write more about using personas in an agile context in one of my next posts. So stay tuned ☺
If you get a chance to experiment with my persona template, then I’d love to hear from you! Write a comment, tweet or email me.
RSS
[...] use personas [...]
[...] A Persona Template http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-innovation/persona-template-for-agile-product-managem… [...]
[...] Personas to describe target users and customers together with their needs [...]
Does it really matter what the persona looks like? Wouldn’t it be better to put more focus on the situation that the potential user will be in.
Hi John, I find that giving a persona a face makes the user believable and helps develop empathy. I capture information about the user’s situation in the context/characteristics or the needs section. Does this help?
Hi Roman, i think so, as long as the personas have been created after discussions with actual potential users/customers, personally im still not sure about needing to give a face to a persona, although i can appreciate why some people do this.
When i say situation i mean with regards to a specific situation that an individual will be in for example when needing to use a web app in a particular way for something very specific, i understand that it will be different when doing this for a book or something else.
I think that sometimes when people are creating personas that they still might miss the point and are creating fluff when it might not always be a type of person using something, but a person in a type of situation.
Hi John, As a persona is meant to be a fictional character using a picture should help you to not confuse it with a real user or customer. I agree that personas should not be fluffy but specific and relevant. I sometimes capture the persona’s need to be addressed or the problem to be solved as a scenario to make it more concrete.
@Roman, although the persona is a fictional character are you putting together a persona based on actual info gathered from real people beforehand? My reason for asking is although you mention not to confuse it with a real user or customer, the end result is targetted at a real user/customer.
Im guessing that you are not meaning creating a persona purely from speculation.
When determining how much time and effort should be spend upfront to create a persona, I recommend investing the bare minimum. The quickly validate the assumptions, and adapt the persona — rather than spending many weeks or months with extensive upfront research. I am hoping to write more about this topic in a separate post in the near future.
@Roman it makes sense, i can see how it could be easy to spend too much time on a persona at the beginning.
I will look forward to your future posts.
[...] Personas describe the target group using fictional users and customers including the needs to be addressed or the problem to be solved. The section therefore explains who we believe is likely to use and purchase and the product and why. (I discuss personas in more detail in my post A Template for Writing Great Personas). [...]
[...] A Persona Template for Agile Product Management [...]
[...] http://www.romanpichler.com – Today, 4:10 PM Rescoop [...]
Good stuff, and really useful. I would recommend to add one more column (and this comes from kind of products I work on) titled “Usage conditions”. This column would have details of situations & devices information. For example, a pre-sales manager uses my product while on move via a tablet computer whereas the sales coordinator is always in office accessing the product via desktop computer.
Hi Abhay, Thanks for your feedback and suggestion. I usually try to keep my personas free from solution-specifcs, particularly for new products and product updates aimed at new markets where the target users and their needs are often not thoroughly understood at the outset. To capture how target users are likely to interact with the product, I use user journey diagrams, as I’ve briefly describe here: http://www.romanpichler.com/blog/agile-product-innovation/the-product-canvas/
[...] As <a persona>, I want to <use product functionality> so that [...]
[...] the epic above tells us that the persona John wants to register for an event [...]
Great post. I’m launching an app that provides another 2 templates for personas, borrowed from the business model generation: Empathy Maps and Value Proposition Designer. I’d love to have feedback from you http://bit.ly/TzdgHa
Personas are so powrful along a number of vectors, that, after having been reluing on this tecnique for many projects, I cannot do without. That said, researching, patternize and crystallize persona into vivid, lifelike characters can be a long process, that includes live interviews. Nobody can afford that upfront (personas like requirements may change). So, I reccomend using an iterative approach the persona discovery process, starting from assumptions, testing them outside the building, rebuilding them and retesting them. LIve interviews tell you quickly what to ask next. Then you can run surveys. Never base personas on internal discussions only…
[...] This blog posts introduces a simple yet powerful persona template that is optimised for lean and agile product development. [...]
[...] Mary is a persona [...]