Personas have broad applicability for digital innovation, giving their applicability for human centered user, customer, and audience understanding in activities such as product development, design, testing, content creation, and marketing.
It is important that a persona is fictional (not an actual individual) yet realistic (based on real data from actual users).
The persona technique has inherent advantages relative to other user analytics techniques, in that persona provides a human face to “cold” numbers, among others. Personas can also be used in conjunction with these other techniques.
However, there is considerable plurality when it comes to persona creation methods, which may be confusing, especially those new to personas but even to those more experienced.
These methods can be grouped into three primary approaches of persona creation, which are qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods.
To help navigate and apply, we present the major steps in each of these three primary approaches of persona creation.
Qualitative
- Step 1: Decide the purpose: Decide the purpose(s) of the use of personas.
- Step 2: Gather data: Conduct manual data collection via interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc. to gather data concerning users. Data can include demographics, behaviors, goals, pain points, etc.
- Step 3: Analyze the data: Analyze the collected data to identify trends, typically via mostly qualitative methods (e.g., grounded theory).
- Step 4: Identify archetype users: From the results of data analysis, identify user segments.
- Step 5: Create persona profiles: Enhance personas with name, picture, topics of interest, quotes, etc.
Quantitative
- Step 1: Decide the purpose: Decide the purpose(s) of the use of personas.
- Step 2: Gather data: Gather the data via automatic means from analytics platforms or from other sources such as surveys and CRM systems. Data will typically contain both demographics and behavioral attributes.
- Step 3: Analyze the data: Analyze the collected data to identify trends, typically via quantitative or algorithmic methods.
- Step 4: Identify archetype users: The quantitative or algorithmic method will generally result in a specific number of user segments.
- Step 5: Create persona profiles: Enhance personas with name, picture, topics of interest, quotes, etc.
Mixed-Methods
- Step 1: Decide the purpose: Decide the purpose(s) of the use of personas.
- Step 2: Gather data: Gather the data generally via automatic means from analytics platforms or from other sources such as surveys and CRM systems. Identify shortfalls and enrich via qualitative methods (or vice versa).
- Step 3: Analyze the data: Analyze the collected data to identify trends, using a mix of qualitative, quantitative, and/or algorithmic methods.
- Step 4: Identify archetype users: Identify the specific number of user segments of current users and/or target users.
- Step 5: Create persona profiles: Enhance personas with name, picture, topics of interest, quotes, etc.
For the full article, see:
Jansen, B. J., Jung, S.G., Salminen, J., Nielsen, L., and Guan, K.W. (2021) Strengths and Weaknesses of Persona Creation Methods: Guidelines for Novice and Experienced Users. 54th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2021) Koloa, Hawaii, United States. 5-8 Jan. 2021. p. 4971-4980.