Modular Personas

Authenticity is of utmost importance when it comes to personas. Our modular personas reveal true distinguishing behaviors among users to provide a clear picture of who is using a product or website, what they need, and why. The personas are backed with real photos, quotes, and if possible, videos. Our work is inspired by the ever evolving and complex behavior of real life users themselves. The goal is to build accurate snapshots of these real human beings that will inspire companies and help guide innovation.

The Problem

Bad personas can make your skin crawl. The ones that offer no real insight into an audience and play make-believe with random facts are not useful in any context. Like with any good story, its difficult to create relatable characters and often what

results in, is a useless persona and descriptions that dont reflect true insights or behavioral differences.

Solution

First and foremost, we eliminate the uselessness from our personas. We use the essay, Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt, to inspire us as to what we avoid as we develop modular personas. A useless persona will include things that are invented and do not matter. Our modular personas use names and groupings that really matter. We also rigorously adapt the persona concept to match the rapid change in the way media is consumed for learning. We aim to effectively highlight and communicate what is important: the core distinctions among users behaviors and needs.

Analysis

Our process draws heavily from the Stanford Design Schools human-centered methodology, and is influenced by strong expertise in linguistics and experience with Mental Models. Our method uses no names, psychology, or broad habits to describe the personas. We remove the things that dont matter, even if they are true, from our personas. This allows us to get at the core needs and desires; in looking at user behavior, we ask why until we arrive at true distinctions and correlations in behavior and new insights for our clients. Note from Teacher for the Analysis part:
Please remember that when making the actual ANALYSIS for the User Experience, names and irrelevant data WONT matter! Creating a full persona with names, ages, genders, etc. is a way to bring to life a possible user and to understand him/her better. However, PLEASE stick to the relevant details when imagining and creating the user experiences, understand the WHY, ask yourselves WHAT would your persona do and HOW would they

react when interacting with your project according to the RELEVANT aspects of their profiles. Please try to do it AS REAL AS POSSIBLE! The picture displayed in Analysis means

I want to be a (Decide on who is this persona going to be. Remember to keep in mind the WHY does this persona want to be who he/she is HOW is this relevant to our project).

Identify who this persona is, take pictures of real people who fit into this persona, WHY are they our target? What are they seeking? What do they want to find in our project.

All personas have a TRIGGER and an APPROACH on why and how to use our project. The TRIGGER is all about WHO they are and WHAT they need. The APPROACH is all about how they interact with our project, ideally it should be PROACTIVE.

And finally, decide WHAT will they find in our project, HOW will we help them, WHAT will their benefits be when using our product.