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In this Live Session, we do a run through of Prototype Persona from Workshop Tactics.
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Session highlights
- I'm not usually a fan of traditional personas “This is Katy, she likes baking, she’s 32 and lives in Wales. Her favourite ice cream flavour is vanilla.” They don’t help us understand how we can help our users
- They are pretending to be real people. It’s not a picture of reality.
- When we treat personas as assumptions to be tested, the become more useful. The keyword here is “prototype”!
- The exercise is usually more important than the output itself, it creates a useful conversation about what your team believes about your users
- Gets your team on the space page, and shows them we are designing for real, complex people, who have real problems.
- Introduces the concept of assumptions, and the importance of testing them.
- Sketch & name: is an icebreaker in disguise to warm people up into creating a persona
- Behavioural demographics: useful info about their lives that influences their behaviour in the context of the product or service you are creating.
- Pain points & needs: these can be assumed from behavioural demographics. Useful to incorporate Five Whys thinking to dive deeper in this part.
- Potential solutions: begins to touch upon what a solution might be, based on problems - not nice to haves
- Solutions are the opposite of problems, just with the "how" missing.
- Personas become a yard stick. They are the beginning, not the end. Only until you go and speak to your customers/users will you be able to validate or invalidate the persona. It’s a starting point for who to go and speak to. They evolve or are discarded as you learn about your users.
Example slice of a persona:
Name & role: Jenny is a user researcher.
Behavioural demographic: She works at a large organisation, and has a yearly personal development training budget. She's keen to climb the career ladder and wants to get the most out of her allowance.
Pain point: She has to convince her boss to sign off learning material, but she doesn’t like to bother people.
Potential solution: A "Convince your boss about Product Club with this PDF" that she can send that will pique her boss’ interest, so she doesn't have to make the case for it.
Behavioural demographic: She works at a large organisation, and has a yearly personal development training budget. She's keen to climb the career ladder and wants to get the most out of her allowance.
Pain point: She has to convince her boss to sign off learning material, but she doesn’t like to bother people.
Potential solution: A "Convince your boss about Product Club with this PDF" that she can send that will pique her boss’ interest, so she doesn't have to make the case for it.
Here you can see how Jenny's behavioural demographic, pain point and potential solution are all coherently linked to tell her story.
Questions
Q: How do you address so many different challenges?
A: It can be daunting to know what to do with so many assumptions. To take this tactic further, you can spend some time with your group Theme Sorting.
Then put the themes on an Assumption Map to find out which of your assumptions are most important to test. You can treat this tactic like a more user-focused version of Assumption Collecting.
Q: How do I know whether any of the details I've created bear out?
A: This tactic treats personas as a prototype; they are assumptions that must be tested. Traditionally, personas are made with no effort to validate if they are based on reality.
What you've written in your persona is the beginnings of a discussion guide to take to your user/customer interviews.
Q: How many people do I need to go out and test these assumptions on?
A: The certainty of your assumption is the weight of your evidence. The more data you have, the more certainty you create. But there there is such thing as too much research!
To answer the question of ’how many?’ - there is no magic number. There is this idea of "just enough research", where too little means you are still debating the truth, which stops you from getting something out there. And too much, where you are over encumbered, and makes you think "we need to learn more, so we're really certain!".
I can't recall who said it, but you should be making decisions with at least 75% certainty. Any more than that, and you are hesitating. Any less, and you are taking an uncalculated risk.
A: It can be daunting to know what to do with so many assumptions. To take this tactic further, you can spend some time with your group Theme Sorting.
Then put the themes on an Assumption Map to find out which of your assumptions are most important to test. You can treat this tactic like a more user-focused version of Assumption Collecting.
Q: How do I know whether any of the details I've created bear out?
A: This tactic treats personas as a prototype; they are assumptions that must be tested. Traditionally, personas are made with no effort to validate if they are based on reality.
What you've written in your persona is the beginnings of a discussion guide to take to your user/customer interviews.
Q: How many people do I need to go out and test these assumptions on?
A: The certainty of your assumption is the weight of your evidence. The more data you have, the more certainty you create. But there there is such thing as too much research!
To answer the question of ’how many?’ - there is no magic number. There is this idea of "just enough research", where too little means you are still debating the truth, which stops you from getting something out there. And too much, where you are over encumbered, and makes you think "we need to learn more, so we're really certain!".
I can't recall who said it, but you should be making decisions with at least 75% certainty. Any more than that, and you are hesitating. Any less, and you are taking an uncalculated risk.
- Speaking to one person about your assumptions is better than none.
- Speaking to a hundred people about your assumptions is better than one.
- Speaking to thirty people about your assumptions is probably more pragmatic than one hundred.
One of the few newsletters I look forward to.
- Dave Cunningham, Head of DesignOps @ NHS
