4 Crucial Items to Include in your Personas
Choosing the right attributes to include or not include in your personas ultimately depends on the product and services and goals of your research. That said, the designers I’ve worked with have consistently been able to derive better value, direction and insights into their design approach when referencing these 4 crucial attributes I often include in personas.
1.Use Case Scenarios
User researcher, designer and author, Kim Goodwin famously commented “Personas without scenarios are like characters with no plot.” Indeed, they are probably one of the most valuable and tangible additions to your personas. Use case scenarios are very effective at removing abstraction and providing key insights and valuable context that support design ideation. Use case scenarios provide insights and context on how, when and why your personas may use and interact with your product. Lastly, use case scenarios are particularly important if you have more than one persona. They really help breakdown and intuit the individual actions and tasks a specific persona is trying to achieve.
2. Context of Use
Context of use can be considered a companion to use case scenarios. It is possible to add that to your use case scenarios, however; I typically like to create these separately in order to go a little deeper and expound on: specific circumstances, environment, and conditions in which a product, service, or technology is intended to be used. Invariably the context of use surfaces up specific challenges, pain points and constraints the persona is encountering specific to their use case scenario. This is particularly valuable when you want to gain more understanding into things like: accessibility needs, potential cultural and social factors, or safety and security considerations.
3. Empathy Maps
Empathy maps can supercharge your personas by tapping into the real challenges, frustrations and emotions users encounter contextual to using a digital product. Empathy maps are typically broken down into 4 quadrants that communicate what our personas are: thinking, feeling, saying and doing when interacting with a digital product. During your research activities, specifically user interviews, these 4 attributes are naturally occurring things that should organically come out; they provide great insights into a users’ psychology and thought process. Consequently, these insights really add meaningful context for designers. They can often surface up a baseline understanding of the user's overarching needs and what they’re trying to accomplish with your product.
4. Jobs to be Done
The Jobs to be Done framework takes understanding a users’ overarching needs several steps further and has become one of the most powerful tools in the user research process. The JTBD framework is based on the theory that users hire your product or service to get a job done. The focus is less on customer behavior, the product itself or the buying process, instead it focuses on the main job a customer is trying to get done. The jobs to be done framework also focuses on “Outcome Driven Innovation” by understanding: user needs, unmet needs as well as over-served needs. By focusing on ODI as the guiding principle in the JTBD framework means being able to predict which products and services have a greater potential for success in the market.
There’s been lots of talk about personas vs jobs to be done, and which is better and more effective. The truth is they are both valuable and ultimately complement each other. Additionally there’s no reason why you can’t integrate JTBD within your personas. I like to include specific questions in my user interviews that seek to get to the root of what job the user is hiring a product or service for. Lastly, I like to add JTBD to my personas as a way of highlighting the value of segmenting by customer needs and unmet needs as a group of people trying to get a job done, rather than demographics or psychographics (which is most often how personas are applied)