Personas - Open University€¦ · Web viewActivity 1. Untitled part. Discussion. Although a persona can be used to represent a group of users and how they are engaging with a project,

Personas

DIY-Learn-personas DIYLearn

Personas

Page 2 of 40 23rd February 2018

http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/course/view.php?id=2217


Personas

Copyright © 2016 The Open University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilised in any form or

by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.




Personas

Contents Personas 1 What are personas? 2 When and why to use personas 3 How personas can help to create empathy 4 Creating personas

4.1 Personas: a case study 5 Using a persona Summary Self-assessment questions End of Module Quiz References and acknowledgements




Personas

PersonasThis module will support your understanding and use of the

Personas Tool from the DIY Toolkit. You should look at the

Personas Template before working through the module. You will

find it helpful to have a print out of the Personas Template with you

while you work through this module.

When planning and managing projects or development activities,

one of the foremost questions on the mind of planners, designers,

decision makers and managers is:

Who are my beneficiaries and users, and what are

they looking for from the project or development

activity?

It is important that you, as a project manager or decision maker,

have a way of deciphering the needs and behaviours of your target

audience(s), in order to best plan for services or activities that

satisfy their needs.

This is where personas – short profiles of model project

beneficiaries or users – can play a useful role in helping you to

gain a clearer understanding of your target audience. This module

explores what personas are and how they are used to help focus a

project on the needs of its user group.




http://diytoolkit.org/tools/personas-2/

Personas

Learning outcomesAfter studying this module, you should be able to:

describe what a persona is and identify why and when

to use it (SAQ 1)

explore how personas can be applied to create

empathy between planners and their target audience

(SAQ 2)

use a persona to create an identity for a target group

(SAQ 3)

construct a persona (SAQ 4).




Personas

1 What are personas?




Personas




Personas

What is a persona?

Personas are word profiles of fictional but realistic individuals that

are used to describe particular groups in your intended audience.

The persona is given a name, age, gender and perhaps even a

picture, coupled with some insight into their lifestyle, aspirations

and motivations for wanting to engage with or use the project or

service at issue.

Time and budgetary constraints tend to mean that service or

project managers, development workers and field agents seldom

meet on a one-to-one basis with their target audience. As a

surrogate for real users, personas present and identify the

motivation, aspirations and expectations driving their behaviour

and attitude in a way that is easy to relate to. This knowledge is

essential to ensure services, projects or programmes are designed

with the end users in mind. Personas can be used to:

identify benefits and features to include in a project or

development activity to ensure that value is delivered

to beneficiaries or users of the project

communicate to all stakeholders the vision for the

project and how it will meet the needs of the users

develop scenarios for user testing




Personas

contribute to the marketing efforts for the project or

development activity.

It is important to be clear that personas are based on facts. For a

persona to have real value in influencing and guiding the planning

or design process for a project or development activity, it is

essential that it’s developed from data collected about real

beneficiaries or users. So, although a persona is a fictional person,

they are designed to represent real data.

Key pointPersonas are short profiles of real (or blends of real) service users

or project beneficiaries.




Personas

2 When and why to use personasPersonas enable project managers and service planners to see

their project or service through the eyes of users and beneficiaries.

There are great benefits to this:

bringing focus to the planning process

personas can help you identify and define your target audience or group

building empathy between users and

planners/managers

help planners/managers to see how things look and feel from the perspectives of the user

encouraging consensus building

ensure shared vision and a buy-in into the project/service development process

creating efficiency

personas help decision makers to make key decisions early in the design process to avoid wasting money and time later.




Personas

(Adapted from Moulder and Yaar, 2007, pp. 22–27)

Activity 1Allow around 10 minutes for this activity

Check your understanding

a. Which of the two statements best represents your

understanding of personas?

Personas are only used once a project is live, as a way to

understand how users are engaging with it.

Personas can be used to inform or influence project, business or

service development at any stage of its life cycle.

View discussion - Untitled part

a. A team has been charged with creating a learning

centre and designing a multipurpose curriculum for

educating displaced children from several different

countries residing in a refugee camp.

What role could the use of personas play in the

curriculum-design process for the centre? What

benefits will personas bring to the planning process?

Make some notes in answer to these questions in the

text box below. Page 12 of 40 23rd February 2018



Personas

Provide your answer...





Personas

3 How personas can help to create empathy

Empathy: walking a mile in someone else’s shoes

Empathy is about experiencing someone else’s feelings as if you

were that person, and is a valuable way to gain insight into the

behaviour of project beneficiaries. A popular phrase in some

cultures is to ‘walk a mile in someone else’s shoes’. This isn’t

meant literally, but is a metaphor for empathy.

The nature of a persona, presenting a rich picture of a person with

a name and backstory, can help you to empathise with the feelings

and motivations of the audience behind that image. Page 14 of 40 23rd February 2018



Personas


Think about someone at work, either a colleague or one of your

customers, partners, clients, beneficiaries etc.

a. In the text box below, make a note of the facts that you

know about them, for example:

age

gender

what you know about their job or other role

where they live.Provide your answer...

a. Now consider the same person from a different

perspective.

What can you guess about how they feel?

What motivates them?

What is likely to cause them concern?

What makes them happy?

Make some notes in answer to these questions in the

text box below.


Finally, reflect on the difference between these two perspectives

on the same person; the factual and empathy-based perspectives. Page 15 of 40 23rd February 2018



Personas

Can you see how empathising with someone could help you

understand them and therefore be better at meeting their needs?

Make some notes in the text box below.






Personas

4 Creating personasBefore you start creating a persona, you’ll need to think about:

who the target group for the personas is and what they

need

how you plan to use the personas and what types of

decision they will inform

the resources you have available to invest in the

process of creating the personas.

There are two main approaches to creating personas:

Quantitative – this approach is about testing and

proving something with a large sample size, using

large data-collection techniques such as surveys. The

Question Ladder Template from the DIY Toolkit will

help you think about the right questions to get the

required information.

Qualitative – this involves finding out about users

or beneficiaries by talking to a small number of those

people. Because of the small sample size, this

approach doesn’t provide robust evidence about the

group. However, it is valuable at uncovering insights

about users or beneficiaries that can then be tested.




http://diytoolkit.org/tools/question-ladder/

Personas

The key difference between the two approaches is that quantitative

research is better at telling you what is happening while

qualitative research is better at telling you why it’s happening. The richest personas will come from a combination of both

approaches.

An individual can carry out their own user research and construct

personas to make sense of target audiences. Nevertheless, social

projects and development activities are rarely about individuals but

about a group of people who share a common purpose, working to

achieve given objectives. Therefore, good practice suggests a

stakeholder group approach to creating personas.

Besides the diversity of opinions informing the personas, another

benefit of a stakeholder approach is consensus building to create a

rich picture of the target audience. Stakeholder involvement in the

building of personas will go a long way to raising the credibility of

the personas and their value as a reference point for making

difficult design or service decisions.

Like any other decision-making tool, personas have their

limitations, challenges and associated risks, including:

stereotyping and unrealistic assumptions being made

in the planning and design process




Personas

the need to have direct access to the target audience,

especially to carry out interviews and/or surveys

closed cultures in organisations or within project

teams, which don’t favour joint working and decision

making.

4.1 Personas: a case studyThe DIY Toolkit Personas template is a good basic framework for

building personas. However in real life, you may have to expand or

reduce the questions and or subsections, or change the template

design to reflect the problem at hand.

The need for the personas, how many are required, and how

detailed they should be will determine who will be involved in the

process of creating them.

Case Study 1: Attracting students to the Postgraduate Leadership Development ProgrammeThe Federal Ministry of Commerce in a developing country entered

into a joint working contract with a leading university in the United

States to help develop their next generation of senior managers

and head of departments. This will be achieved through

participation in the Postgraduate Leadership Development

Programme, to be delivered in partnership with a local university.




Personas

Two years after signing the agreement, the programme has not

been able to attract enough students to justify its existence. The

Ministry is trying to understand why uptake is so low, and

colleagues at the US university suggested using personas as a

way to explore the needs and motivations of the target group.

Members of the project team from the Ministry interviewed three

men and three women who would qualify for the programme, but

have not yet applied. One of the men has complicated and

demanding family commitments that are making it difficult for him

to hold down his job, and would prohibit him from taking on any

additional commitments. Among the other five, though, there are

three common threads to their responses:

1. they were only vaguely aware of the programme and

did not think they qualified to participate

2. they thought it would cost them money

3. they didn’t believe their participation would be

supported by their line managers, particularly with

regard to allowing them time away from their desks to

study.

These common points, along with other general information

(including the restrictions on who qualifies for the programme),

were sufficient to start building a persona. The draft persona,




Personas

named Doris, is shown in Figure 1 below. (Please note that the

team have used a stock photo to represent Doris.)




Personas




Personas

Figure 1: Doris’s persona


Look again at the case study above and Doris’s persona (Figure

1).

If you were a member of the project team, what would you advise

the Ministry to do next? Make some notes in answer to this

question in the text box below.


View discussion - Activity 3




Personas

5 Using a personaFigure 2 below shows a summary of points that we have made

already, condensed into a five-step reminder to help you in your

own process of constructing personas:

Figure 2: Five steps to creating a persona





Personas

Now that you have nearly completed studying this module, you

should be ready to start thinking about how to use personas to

gain insight into users, customers or beneficiaries of your own

work. Make an action plan for the next steps, filling in Table 1

below.

Table 1 Action plan for using personas

Tasks

To completed by ...

Working with ...

I will need ...









Pr Pr Pr Pr




Personas

ovide your answer...












View discussion - Activity 4




Personas

SummaryThis module has described what a persona is and explored why

and where you would use personas in a project or business

development life cycle. It has guided you in exploring how to

construct a persona to represent and create empathy with the

needs of a user group, and highlighted the challenge and risk

associated with using and creating personas.




Personas

Self-assessment questionsSAQ 1Which of the statements below are true? (Note that you’ll need to

uncheck all the boxes in order to make the ‘Reveal answer’

function work.)

A persona creates a profile of a typical user.

Personas are a list of information about a service-user or client.

Personas are grounded in research.

Personas can help bring focus to a planning process.

SAQ 2a. Personas are most suitable for which of the following?

User research

Defining markets

Feasibility testing

a. ‘Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes’ is a

metaphor for:

Sympathy Page 28 of 40 23rd February 2018



Personas

Understanding

Empathy

a. Which one of the below is not required for

empathising?

Negotiating

Listening

Sensitivity

SAQ 3Drag and drop the words below into the missing gaps in the

sentences.

Interactive content is not available in this format.

SAQ 4Put these five steps in the order in which they are presented in this

module:

Step 1

Step 2

Step 3




Personas

Step 4

Step 5

Include the broader team in the process

Develop an intimate knowledge of each persona

Condense the research

Carry out your own research and observation

Brainstorm




Personas

End of Module QuizCongratulations, you have now reached the end of this module!

We hope that you have enjoyed it, and have learned useful skills.

End of Module Quiz

This quiz allows you to work towards your badge for DIY Learn: Personas. To achieve your badge, you must answer six out

of eight questions correctly.

You can try each question three times.

There is no limit to the number of attempts you can

have to take the whole quiz.

If you answer fewer than six questions correctly, you

will need to start again if you want to earn your badge.

Don’t worry if you are not successful first time, as you will be able

to attempt the quiz again in 24 hours.

You need to enrol in this course before you can attempt this quiz

which you can do by clicking on the Sign up / Sign in button at the

top of this page.

End of module quiz




http://www.open.edu/openlearnworks/mod/quiz/view.php?id=81123

Personas

When you have finished the quiz, click on ‘Next’ to review your

‘Summary of attempt’. Once you are happy with your answers,

click ‘Submit all and finish’. Once you have finished this quiz you

will be redirected back to this page.

Don’t forget there are another nine modules to choose from which

you can find on the DIY Learn home page.




http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/course/index.php?categoryid=142

Personas

References and acknowledgementsInspired by: Business Design Toolkit (2010) Personas.

This Module should be cited as follows:

DIY Learn (2016) Personas, Copyright © The Open University and

Nesta

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated below, this

content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-

ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and

used under licence for this project, and not subject to the Creative

Commons Licence. This means that this material may only be

used un-adapted within the DIY Learn project and not in any

subsequent OER versions.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for

permission to reproduce the material in this module:

Figure 'empathy': © SQUAMISH/iStockphoto.com

Figure 1: © Henrique NDR Martins/iStockphoto.com

Calabria, T (2004) ‘An introduction to Personas and how to create

them’ Step Two, 2 March. Available at




http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

http://www.businessdesigntools.com/2011/12/personas/

Personas

www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_Personas/ (Accessed 17

February 2016).

Moulder, S. and Yaar, Z. (2007) The User is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web (Voices That Matter) Berkley, CA., New Riders.

Return to the DIY Learn home page




http://www.open.edu/openlearncreate/course/index.php?categoryid=142

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_Personas/

Personas

Activity 1Untitled partDiscussionAlthough a persona can be used to represent a group of users and

how they are engaging with a project, based on real data about

those users, this is not the only possible use for personas. They

are suitable for informing and influencing decisions at any point in

a project. However, they are particularly useful for informing and

influencing decisions before a commitment is made to a cause of

action.

Back to Session 2 Part 1




Personas

Activity 1Untitled partDiscussionThe fundamental question and dilemma facing any project team

with a new initiative is having a clear understanding of their target

audience. Without a clear understanding of the need of the target

audience, it is difficult to create or develop a fit for purpose project.

In the example above, there are different nationalities and cultures

represented in a refugee camp, therefore a single curriculum may

not best serve the learning needs of the displaced children. The

team could produce a persona for a boy and girl from each

nationality, maybe within two or three different age groups. The

design for the centre and the curriculum can then be built around

and tested against each persona.





Personas

Activity 2Untitled partDiscussionSome people find it easier to empathise than others. If you

struggled with this activity, you could try again with someone

closer to you whose motivations you will find it easier to guess, for

example your partner, brother or sister, or parent.





Personas

Activity 3DiscussionThe project team should now decide whether:

a. this is sufficient information for them to start defining

the problem and building a response

or

a. they should use a survey to test whether these points

really are common across a much wider selection of

the target group.

If there are any other trends attributable to identifying features –

such as gender, location, or duration of employment – they could

also divide the persona into two or more. However, the project

team must be careful not to stereotype (for example, by assuming

that all the women will want to have children – and therefore need

career breaks – just because Doris wants to). Depending on time

constraints, they could start a cautious response, perhaps by

changing the way they promote the programme and emphasising

the qualifying criteria and that it is free. They could also plan some

sort of engagement with potential line-managers of qualifying

students. They could then organise a survey, to run at the same




Personas

time, to check that they are taking the right course of action before

they commit more resources to this solution.

Back to Session 4 Activity 1




Personas

Activity 4DiscussionYour plan will be personal to you, but it should be formed around

the five-step guide above to make sure you cover all the necessary

tasks.

Back to Session 5 Activity 1




Documents

Personas - Open University€¦ · Web viewActivity 1. Untitled part. Discussion. Although a persona can be used to represent a group of users and how they are engaging with a project,