what are personas
the representation of a profile
Personas are fictional characters that represent the different profiles of people who may come to relate or are already related to the business, product or service.
Creating personas helps to understand these people’s expectations. Personas help to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations when creating affinity with these characters, as it happens in movies or books when we empathize with the characters.
Personas do not describe real people, but personalized profiles of people to understand the patterns that synthesize the types of people for whom it is intended to offer products or services.
Building personas helps ask the right questions and answer them according to the people you are designing for.
how to build personas
the evolution of a profile
The construction of personas initially involves the understanding that, as with products and services, they, personas, also evolve throughout the project.
To understand this evolution, we are going to distribute personas in two extreme poles, quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative personas are built essentially on the basis of data from research. On the other hand, qualitative personas emerge from the team’s experience with the profiles of people who belong to the project context.
Adopting an incremental and iterative perspective in the development of personas, we started building it from the team’s [qualitative] experiences to evolve from [quantitative] data that are learned during the project.
This incremental approach has the main purpose of unlocking the process of creating and developing innovative products or services. Often, as much as the object being designed, the personas are still unclear at the beginning of the journey and need to be tested, validated, evolved from what is learned in the course of the project.
what are the types of personas
the purpose of a profile
The challenge when choosing types of persona is in defining the purpose of the project, that is, if we are going to create a product, service or even a starting business, we will have unknown personas, for which we do not yet have data and we do not even know what data we will have. On the other hand, if the purpose is to improve an existing product or service, the personas are known to us.
The known persona is built to help the business design journeys of people who already use, consume, produce or interact in some way with the existing product or service to propose improvements, adjustments that take that journey to the nearest to a planned journey or expected. This persona is usually built from data, even though in the first instant the data does not have sufficient depth and width to define a precise profile, they serve as support for the evolution of the persona.
The unknown persona, more open, represents people who are on the periphery of business, still do not relate to their products or services. In this case, a much more speculative approach is needed. Often, even if you don’t even have a product or service for that persona, it will be designed, developed, tested and evolve from that persona, which will also be incremental, and will mature during the process.
© 2020 – 2021 tds.company all rights reserved
This text was written by professors Silvio Meira and André Neves.
[tds.company] is the home of strateegia, a theory of practice for strategic transformation, about which we wrote a long, illustrated sentence, which is available in pdf, at the link [http://bit.ly/TDSCsat]. Our strategic enablement work is done on a digital platform that can be tested for free at the link [http://strateegia.digital].
Photo by mauro mora on Unsplash
