Personas

In Chapter 2, you had an introduction to user personas. You learned about lightweight or proto-personas, which are created based on assumptions. Now, you’ll see how you can expand those initial assumptions into a set of qualitative personas. These are based on interviews and other research done on a small sample of your potential user base. Let’s start by identifying the attributes of user personas. The first thing to always keep in mind is that personas are fictional characters. They’re not meant to represent any single person or to identify a particular individual. The goal is to amalgamate traits and insights obtained from interviews with real people into a fictional character that represents the whole group without specifying anyone in particular. In other words, personas are generalized representations of a group of potential users or customers. However, being a generalized representation doesn’t mean that you can’t go deep into their...