How to group users into personas

Question

I'm freaking out! I've read more articles about personas than I can remember but there is one thing I can't seem to understand. And that is how do you group users into personas?

What methods and questions do you use to understand how to form user groups? All these articles seem to skim this bit and go directly into how to write a persona - you know, "Well, first you need an image, and a name and then specify if he's more of a cat person than a dog person etc, showing a 5 pages long description about this person. I get that. That's the easy part. What I wanna know is how to group visitors. The stage before this step.

Some articles seem to hint that a persona is based on the motive behind the visit, but if I ask 20 people why they have arrived and what tasks they want to perform I could get 20 different motives. It can't be right to create 20 personas in that case? Some articles states that a ux persona is su-hu-hu-hu-reley not the same thing as target groups or a already defined market segment. And they are not the same thing as a high level stakeholder such as a new client, existing client or a job seeker.

So I have no idea where to start and if you could help me explaining this to me like I'm 5 years old, you not only answer a question and get a lovley upvote, you're also preventing a guy from an early death (ok, that last part was a little exaggerated).

Answer 1

Grouping people's traits into personas is not "a step before", it is rather "a step after" the initial interviews.

As you probably already know, the persona should be probable, believable, consistent, have boundaries and so on... That means, persona is a representation of people who share similiar:

• Goals
• Needs
• Problems
• Thinking

The main problems with that are (mainly) two:

• People do not directly speak about their needs
• People usually mix the roles they act as

So, they would (for example) tell you what they would like to see or do but not why they need that representation of information or action. So, before you can recognize such needs as the same, you should first recognize the needs.

They would also, easily mix the roles they act as, because they mix it as easily in a real life. So (for example), they would tell you about their use of your "job portal" as a person who seeks for a job and a moment later, they would tell you how they use it as a person who wants to post a job ad. So again, it's your job to separate those behaviour into a separate personas with separate goals...

If you really, I mean really, encounter the 20 different people with 20 different motives, then you should refer to the vision of your product. Whom are you building it for? With limited resources you can not build a product for everyone, their motives may be contrary also. Your target and your vision should guide you when creating the personas.

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Edit, case study type example:

Lets assume that people bruggle (a fictional verb). Our vision is to create a product which will help people who bruggle on their own.

We do research and initial interviews. It looks like most of the people can't bruggle alone, it is too complicated and they need professional help.

So we change the vision and decide to support such bruggler-helper relation. We adjust the group and continue the interviews. There are some small companies which help to bruggle and ex-professionals (or professionals) who do it off hours.

The interviewed people tend to mix their roles. One minute they are speaking about how they work in company, and the next minute they are speaking about how are they helping off-hours. Both roles have a common goal (or set of goals): to help the bruggler. It looks like a one-persona-situation. If you ask about their preferences, thinking, principles, you will probably get an answer related to one of the roles they are currently thinking about. It is difficult to realize there are two different mindsets in play, because interviewed person does not make such distinction (but when we do realize it, it becomes obvious...)

After interviews, it becomes clear: both professionals and companies, in order to generate enough income, need to work with multiple brugglers. One bruggle-helper may use our product but not all of his brugglers will. Since our product will have a significant impact on them and since we can not afford to miss such opportunity - we will be forced to create a persona for a bruggler who doesn't use our product but is in the circle of its influence.

And it goes on and on... Of course, not all of the personas are primary, but there are often a very strong reasons for creating one. I can not call it "one persona per motivation".

Answer 2

Personas is a modeling method based on empirical quantitative data, enriched with qualitative statements. The approach to gather that data differ between quantitative and qualitative. For "best" quantitative results, the data should be standardized. Qualitative statements are "best", when answered freely or observed without interference (field study).

So if you i.e. get 20 different motives from 20 different visitors, that might be an indicator, that your visitors are extremly diverse. That might be because your service is a very common one, that everyone needs from time to time.

Take a supermarket. Almost everyone has to buy something sometime. So supermarkets need to adress a broad variety of people. However, they still have a primary target group. Like in downtown, it might be more of the "stressed workaholic, wanting to get fast and get fast out". In a suburb, it's probably the "weekend-buying mom, looking for new ideas to cook".

So when you get 20 different motives, try to digg deeper. Is it just a snap-shot? Perhaps you have to conduct your study over a longer period of time. Or have those motives similarities on a higher level? Like "I visit because of the punk rock albums" and "I visit because of the death metal albums" => "I visit because of music". So try to standardize your observations, perhaps your visitors are not that different than it seems on the first sight.

Hope, I could help you a little with that answer. I recommend to read Alan Coopers "About Face 3.0". There you'll find a description, how to create personas, since he invented this method.

Answer 3

A persona (plural personae or personas), in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. Ref: Wikipedia: Persona

This means that a persona is not a real person, but an avatar who represents different attributes a person or several persons might have. These attributes could be invented by a UX guy or they can be attributes coming from real survey where users answer questionnaires’ and the UX guy group these different attributes together to form a persona.

A persona can be very lengthy, but the way I use it, I prefer just a few bullets saying little of the persona itself. A few examples would be:

• Alice, 20 years old student, internet experience: high, computer knowledge: average, likes: Facebook, chatting with her friends at Starbucks and her boyfriend.
• John, 75 years old retired captain of US Army, internet experience: very low, computer knowledge: limited, likes: football on TV, gardening and the local pub (where he spends most of his time).

In my view, persona should be used spares having a maximum number of 5, since you need to use your personas as you design, develop and implement your product. And this is key: your personas should be printed out, hanging in front of the designers and developers, in order to get them to know that real people will use their product, when it is finished. This is the most important part – designers and developers shouldn’t be able to get away from the personas. The reason is very simple – know your customer, feel the spirit and limitations of your customer and your product will be better.

Second, you should also use your persona to test your product like: How would John know what to do with this interface? He would most likely have trouble using Google search field if he didn’t get any guidance first. But Alice would have no trouble at all. How can we help John to complete tasks? When this works, and you know your customers – magic happens.