How do you build your personas?
We have been working on some projects that required us to build behavioral archetypes recently.
For us archetypes are the place where our insights and patterns exist - from here if you want to create "characters" or "personas" then you can decide to do that, but don't skip the archetypes.
Before any project, we do our our research. We look in many places for inspiration and evidence before we start, from the scientific literature, to data, to the work by practitioners like Indi Young or Amber Westerholm- Smyth, as we are always trying to get better and improve.
The latter wrote a piece on personas which states that you should include:
-No ages -No photographs -No salaries -No names -No genders
You should instead be thinking about patterns that they share in getting their job done/needs met or in getting to their intended outcome or purpose.
I like to think about those from a behavioral perspective and look at things like beliefs, norms, decision-making, memory, motivation quality, attention, fears, anxieties, as well as other attributes... (cognition, capability, environment). These can serve as a foundation and from there we can add anything else that is specific to context/project we are working on.
We use surveys, interviews and other data sources available to find the patterns and then to use those insights to create archetypes.
If your company already has personas, we can evaluate how well those personas match to the archetypes, and if they don't, then we can enhance them or derive whole new archetypes from the work.
Back to Amber
She goes into describing the process she and her team took to build her personas: (most probably archetypes)
A five-step framework (see more in the article in comments)
1. Ask rich questions, not dumb questions 2. Write a codebook 3.
Code your data 4. Map your data 5. Form your personas (archetypes)
We need to think differently about how we design for our customers and employees.
The tools and methods are out there - we just have to apply them in a different way!
I know it is hard to get people to understand why you removed this demographic data, but in the end you are looking for patterns - once you find those and create your archetype, then if you wish to create "characters" for storytelling etc, then by all means do so, just make sure they are rooted in the patterns.
How do you approach this at your work?
If you want us to help build behavioral archetypes for your organization or evaluate the one's you have, get in touch