Personas.

A persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product. It is used to promote empathy, increase awareness and memorability of target users, prioritize features, and inform design decisions. These require some level of critical thinking, but as with most of these discovery articles, you cannot simply think up a persona, they will jump out at you the longer you spend in discovery. Your definitions of your personas should be updated over time as you uncover more insights about your users.

Persona Types

1. Goal-directed persona. This type of persona splits your users up by what goal they try to achieve with your product.

2. Role-based persona. These are based on the roles of users in the product space e.g. the users that will be using the product in an organization.

3. Engaging persona. These can incorporate both goal and role-directed personas, as well as the more traditional rounded personas. They are perceived to be more ‘real’. These personas examine the emotions of the user, their psychology, backgrounds and make them relevant to the task at hand.

4. Fictional persona. These require the team to make assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base and products to deliver a picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like.

Sample persona

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Excerpt from the FX team

Sample: https://teamapt.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PM/pages/1541308613

Sample persona template

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Sources: Personas: Study Guide, Personas – A Simple Introduction