In my earlier blog post, Beware persona templates, I described the importance of creating foundation documents for your personas before rushing to create final presentation documents. This post describes what you should put into your persona foundation documents.

I tend to think about foundation documents in terms of these major building blocks.

Activities and goals

The core of any persona is what they are doing and why they are doing it. I always work hardest on describing each persona's activities and goals and highlighting aspects of their behaviour and motivation that makes them different from the other personas.

For example, your research has found that working parents with young families and little spare time buy most of their groceries online when their children are in bed, and have them delivered at a convenient time. But they buy other household items and some groceries at a store on their way home from work. When they visit the store they are in a hurry and make mistakes that they can ill-afford.

Why do they do that? Well they have to fit their shopping around their shift-patterns and childcare. For groceries they can choose a convenient delivery date and time slot, but for other goods they can only get an estimated delivery date. Whoever arrives home first will sometimes send text messages to their partner asking them to pick up additional items on the way home. But the details get confused and they end up buying the wrong size, type or amount of an item.

Character

One of the strengths of personas is their ability to create empathy and recognition in the people who will use them. Therefore, it pays off to take care with the name, age, photo, family and work circumstances, and personal aspects of your personas.

Our example working-parent becomes 32 year-old Sally. She is married to Alex and they have 3 children aged 2, 5 and 7. In her photo Sally is sitting at her kitchen table wearing a uniform with a name badge. When she works late shifts Alex records her favourite soaps but Sally is often tired and falls asleep while she watches them.

Story

Whether you call it their journey, scenario or story, a good narrative is a wonderfully concise and engaging way to express the design challenges and opportunities that a persona represents. At this stage the stories can be text, simple sketches or a mixture of both.

In our example, as Sally leaves work she has a text from Alex. They need a new school jumper to replace a torn one, new light bulbs for the kitchen, and package lunch stuff for a school trip they had forgotten about. When she gets to the store she tries to call Alex but the phone is busy, so she rushes round to buy the items they need. The items are spread all round the store so it takes much longer than she thought. When she gets home Sally makes the packed lunch while Alex replaces the light bulbs. The bulbs are the wrong size for the kitchen light fittings.

And stories are also a great way to contrast how things are now, how things will be when a new product or service is available, and how to make that transition.

Challenges

To have any value, personas must provide insights that will drive the design. In particular, it must be clear how your personas constrain possible design solutions. So pay attention to the design challenges each persona presents.

In our example, Sally and Alex can afford only basic mobile phones and have access to the internet only at home on a creaky second-hand laptop. Neither can take a voice phone call at work and will often take a long time to respond to a text message. And when they get in from work and are bathing the children or reading them stories they may not answer the phone or notice a text.

From this we see that solutions based on mobile apps won't work for them and they cannot afford any new product or service that adds to their costs.

Attributes

When you present your personas, you will want to make them easily 'glanceable' so that your audience can quickly grasp their most important aspects and understand the differences between them. In presentation documents, large analogue scales and keyword groups are a great way to summarise a persona's situation, motivation and behaviour. You should document these attributes in each persona’s foundation document.

In our example, important attributes for our personas may be amount of free time, frequency of shopping, amount of pre-planning, mobile internet access, etc.

Conclusion

As I described in my previous post, from these solid and reusable foundations you can quickly create a range of presentation documents in a variety of formats.

Further Reading

Read Indi Young's Mental Models and Don Norman on Activity Centred Design for more about the importance of behaviour over demographics in personas. Read Pruitt & Aldin's The Persona Lifecycle for the importance of empathy and recognition. Read Giles Colborne' Simple and Usable and Quesenbery & Brooks' Storytelling for User Experience for more on creating and using stories.

Postscript

There are any number of ways to improve Sally's shopping experience. How would you help make her life easier?

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Two of my recent projects have been larger strategic persona developments, and like the proverbial anteater, I seem to have become 'the persona guy' here at Harella House. But that's fine with me and I've had some great discussions about the best ways to create, present and use personas.

One of the most interesting questions has been whether we should have a standard persona template. I firmly believe that we shouldn't and that trying to use one would be harmful.

The problems with persona templates

Firstly, what's important to say about our personas and the best way to communicate them varies too much from project to project. Secondly, a template can encourage us to rush straight from the research data into the final presentation document by just filling in the required sections.

But where does that leave a newbie trying to create their first personas?

Fortunately, there are some simple steps you can take to help you create personas with great content and to present them in a way that will make a real impact.

1. Start with the skeleton

Whatever research approach you've used, and whether you're working alone or in a workshop, there will always be a point where some strong behavioural clusters emerge from the data. If you can give each of these clusters a basic character (name, age, gender, role, goals and situation), and that character rings true, then you have a good persona 'skeleton'.

2. Build the foundation

For each of these skeletons you should create a 'foundation' document that holds all the data for the persona. When you start this document, don't worry too much about how the document is structured or how it looks. Just make sure that everything you include is based in your data and says something important about the persona.

In my foundation documents I concentrate on:

• activities — what the persona is doing
• goals — why they are doing it
• character — to create recognition and empathy in the audience
• stories — concrete illustrations of the persona acting to achieve their goals
• challenges — specific design challenges that the persona represents
• attributes — differentiating characteristics of the persona.

3. Speak to your audience

Once you have the foundation for each persona you can think more clearly about how best to present them. Which elements of the content are most important? What tone of voice and presentation style will have the most impact? And which presentation format will work best within the client organisation's culture.

As an example, let's say you work in an organisation that is all about customer service and building relationships. You have lots of small face-to-face meetings and you have motivational posters on your walls.

• Present your personas in A3 documents that people can discuss over a meeting room table and A0 posters that people will see around them every day
• Use a conversational tone of voice and a friendly visual style that fits with your company’s branding guidelines
• Focus on your personas' character, motivation and story over more abstract descriptions of activities and characteristics
• Use quotes and biographical details to make your persona more engaging.

Alternatively, let's say your client’s organisation is very focussed on performance metrics and objectives, facts and numbers. Their staff are spread across several offices, many people hot desk and everyone speaks in PowerPoint.

• Give your client the foundation document and two slide decks: a shorter deck they can use to introduce the personas and a longer slide deck they can use to give more detail on each persona
• Use a factual and authoritative tone of voice
• Focus on key attributes and design challenges
• Represent attributes with scales and make clear statements in bullet points
• Keep stories short and clearly tie story elements to design challenges.

Conclusion

If you’ve been trying to squeeze your personas into a generic template, throw off that straightjacket. Collect and organise your content in foundation documents and then let the personas speak to your audience through targeted presentation documents.

Further reading

For more on persona skeletons and persona foundation documents I can strongly recommend The Persona Lifecycle by John Pruitt & Tamara Adlin.

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