- So far you've been out and observed the problem firsthand
and you've developed a way of describing that problem
to each other and to anyone else who needs to know.
Your experience map and your list of pain points and goals,
let you speak clearly from the data you gathered.
One thing's missing though,
who are you building this solution for?
Just saying users or customers, isn't very useful.
What we want to do is focus in
on a couple of example people who we know
are true users of the product.
These example people become the personas
that will do develop the product for.
A Ideal people probably don't exist in real life,
so we'll create them.
By giving them the attributes we're looking for,
but keeping them believable by referencing
what we learned during our observations,
we can give the team a good idea
of who they're developing for.
What I found time and time again
is that if you build for specific people,
the solution will scale
to other similar groups of individuals.
This is called carry over.
Building truly exceptional product
for a small target group will appeal
carry over to a wide range of similar individuals.
If instead you build with a broad,
but undefined set of users in your head,
your solution is unlikely to work well for any of them.
In our example project, each team member
individually created a few different persona ideas.
Listing their attributes like age,
comfort level with technology
and other relevant background information.
Their goals in the kind of interaction you're studying,
their concerns and a couple of representative quotes.
Then the team shared their personas
with the rest of the group
and together they decided on the attributes
they wanted to combine into three personas.
A rider, a maintenance person who works on the trails
a couple of weekends each month,
and someone who maintains trails and rides as well.
Those three personas are all believable,
given the data we got from the observation sessions.
Now, the team has a way of referring
to specific user attributes
just by using the names of their three personas.
The personas become shorthand for the user attributes
the team cares most about.
As the team works with the project
there'll be interacting a lot more with potential customers.
They can improve and refine their persona descriptions
using data they gather from those experiences.