Personas

The next part of our discovery process is identifying the personas of users in our system. These don’t represent real people, but a representation of individuals that will be using your product. We use this personas to identify whether the decisions we make about the product provide real value for our users. Personas are composed of four things:

Name

We typically give our personas names like “Jane the customer”, “Brian the claims representative”, or “Samantha the hiring manager”.

Attributes

Attributes are used to describe the persona, we use things like age, gender, economic status as well as more complex descriptors like their comfort level with technology or their speed in making decisions.

Motiviations

What motivates a given persona? What are they looking for? What are they looking to do? What are their needs? These are important questions we must answer in order to understand as we make product decisions.

We’re building software for humans. Understanding these humans is essential in building successful products. By creating these personas, we can always ask ourselves if our decisions will positively impact our users and add value for them.