• Creating Personas

    Personas are fictitious characters created to embody specific key characteristics of target user groups. Personas allows you to package user research data into sample users that can, in turn, be used to develop use cases for your learning space and to design services. Personas offer many benefits for those undertaking design projects, including:

      • Making assumptions and knowledge about users explicit and thereby giving the team a common language with which to talk meaningfully about users
      • Allowing the project team to focus on and design for a small set of specific users who are different than the team members
      • Building empathy towards users in a way that reports of qualitative and quantitative data cannot accomplish

    See: Adlin, T., & Pruitt, J. (2010). The essential persona lifecycle. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, p. 1.

    Tools

    • Creating Personas Workshop Tool provides an overview of the personas creating process and is designed for a facilitator working with team to design personas, beginning with collaboration in a workshop setting.
    • Persona Development Workshop Overview (PDF) can be used within a personas creation workshop to inform participants about the process and to describe specific “sticky note” exercises used to develop personas.
    • Sample Undergraduate Personas (PDF) – NCSU Libraries illustrate what final personas might look like.