The big idea: A persona is one specific, named, fictional person built entirely out of real research data, standing in for a whole group of users.
It exists so that a design meeting argues about Margaret, who can be pictured holding the product, instead of about "the elderly", who cannot.
Five fields, five arrows. Step through and watch each field arrive from a piece of research — if a field has no arrow, it was invented.
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Not a persona
- "Teenagers aged 13-19" — a category, not a person
- A made-up character with a stock photo and a nice name
- An average of everyone you interviewed
- Yourself, with a different name
A persona
- One person: name, age, situation
- Behaviours taken from observation, in numbers
- An environment taken from field research
- A goal and a frustration, each traceable to evidence
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| Field | Where it comes from | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Who | Questionnaire demographics | Margaret, 71, lives alone |
| Behaviour | Observation and interview together | Boils the kettle 4-5 times a day; sets it down to open the lid |
| Environment | Field research | The kettle lives beside the sink, on a low worktop |
| Goal | Interviews — stated in the user's terms | A hot drink, made safely, without asking for help |
| Frustration | Focus group or observed failure | Steam scalds the wrist when the lid is opened |
The one rule: If a field has no evidence behind it, delete the field.
An invented detail does not sit harmlessly on the page. It gets used: someone designs for Margaret's love of gardening, and gardening came from nowhere.
Write the goal as the user's, not the product's: Margaret does not want a kettle. She wants a hot drink without a burn.
Written that way, the goal rules concepts out immediately — and it leaves room for solutions that are not kettles at all.
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How designers actually use one
The primary persona is the one you must satisfy
If the design works for nobody else, it must still work for the primary persona. There is only one, and choosing it is a real decision.
Secondary personae are accommodated where possible
You keep them in mind, but you never compromise the primary persona to suit them. Two or three is plenty.
Settle arguments with it
"Would Margaret use this?" ends a debate that "would users like it?" can run forever. That is most of the value.
Carry it into the specification
Each frustration becomes a requirement, and each requirement becomes something you can test the prototype against.
Advantages
- Keeps a real user in the room during every decision
- Makes research findings usable rather than filed away
- Builds empathy — a name and a situation are remembered
- Gives a fast test for any idea: would this person use it?
Disadvantages
- One person cannot represent the range in a real population
- Easy to invent, and an invented persona is worse than none
- Can freeze the design around a user who has since changed
- Tempting to design for the persona's personality rather than their task
Do not average: Building one persona out of the average of everybody produces a person who does not exist and whose needs contradict each other.
Pick the real cluster in your data that matters most, and build the persona from that cluster alone.
How this is tested — creating a primary persona from research data and using it to guide development. It comes up two ways:
Paper 1 — multiple choice
- Identify which field of a persona a stated finding supports.
- Pick the fault in a persona presented to you.
Paper 2 — analysing a product
- Create a primary persona from given research for a named product.
- Explain an advantage and a disadvantage of designing to a persona.
The trap: Writing a persona that reads like a character in a story — favourite colour, pets, a photograph — while the behaviour, environment and frustration are missing. Only those three change a design.
Research into a hospital car-park ticket machine found: 71% of users are visitors aged over 55; 14 of 20 observed users queued behind someone who needed help; interviews repeatedly mentioned arriving anxious and short of time; field research found the machine faces direct afternoon sun. Present a primary persona based on this research.
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