I'm creating personas for an international website. The users from two countries, France and the UK, will use the same website to exchange money.
There are specific segments of personas that I need to design for; small business owners and landlords, for example.
That said, do I need to separate them out per country? Their goals will be the same for each persona segment, but their behaviours could be different, I suppose, if they are from different countries.
I would say yes:
I am actually going through the same dilemma right now - designing for a particular persona - but have divided into Canada and U.S versions, and would argue there are more cultural and myriad factors separating France and UK user base.
The further I develop these, the more I realise the base/high level is very much the same but alot of the granular details such as: Conferences they would attend, qualifications, working hours etc. Regardless of how extensively used, it is useful to have that kind of segmented data for future initiatives.
Hope this helps.
You need to create personas that represent your users. If small-business owners in the UK have different expectations or behaviors than small-business owners in France, and targeting both audiences is important for your site, then your personas will need to reflect this. For some purposes, you don't need to create country-specific personas. For some, you do. You will have to do the user research necessary to determine whether you need country-specific personas.
Have you done the research to identify the needs, uses and behaviors of users across the markets? Personas are always a representation of your knowledge of the user. Doing research (preferably talking to actual individual users) will provide you depth to any second hand or anecdotal evidence you find online.
I would argue that a persona allows you to give a face to a set of users that are going to execute one or more user stories using your application.
If after some user research you come to the conclusion that some France users need to execute different user stories than UK users, then you should create different personas.
On the other hand, if you find out that both French and British landlords have the same kinds of problems and are going to execute exactly the same user stories, then there is no advantage in creating different personas them.
