¹û¶³Ó°Ôº

Learn what a user persona is, why it's important and how to create one for your hackathon.

A key part of running a successful hackathon is for all participants to have a clear understanding of who will be using the product (or service) that you are developing. One way of doing this is to develop a user persona.

Here we explain what a user persona is, why it's important, and how you can create one yourself.

We also share how we created our user persona, ‘’, for the CreaTech Glossary hackathon.Ìý

What is a user persona?

A user persona is a fictional profile of the end user of a product or service. It helps to bring that person to life and to answer the questions like who are we creating the product for? and how can it best be designed to suit their needs? Although fictional, the persona will represent real life users and will include as much relevant information about the end user(s) as possible.

Why does it matter?

At first, some of the information in the user persona might seem unnecessary (especially if you feel you already have a good grasp of the problem). However, the more detail you can include the better as this helps the design team to fully understand the user’s needs and, ultimately, to test the viability of any proposed solution.

User personas help the design team to put themselves ‘in the shoes’ of their end user. They provide valuable insights that help the team create a product that provides genuine value – one that addresses a real need and provides a useful solution given the context in which that need arises. For example, it's no use writing a 300-page book as a solution if your user will only have 15 minutes on their daily commute to access the information.

One important aspect of creating a user persona is to be clear on that user’s objectives and priorities (which cannot be assumed). There are multiple potential solutions to any given problem, and it is only by understanding the user’s needs and priorities that the design team can choose the right approach. Does the user want to get a promotion, maximise their profit or reduce their time spent in the office? Each of these goals will likely require a very different solution.

A key benefit of user personas for team activities is that they ensure every team member has the same understanding of the end user and their needs. This is especially the case for multi-disciplinary teams, or those that have not worked together before, where individual team members may have different perspectives on the problem. Once the team has started work, a user persona is a resource that the team can, and should, return to throughout the design process to constantly test and refine their ideas.

How to create a user persona

Research

You should use research to help you understand the problem and the user you want to focus on. Although fictional, the persona should reflect real user experiences and needs (don’t just make it up).

There will often be multiple stakeholders impacted by the problem but choose which is your primary focus. If you do want to consider multiple stakeholders, create separate personas for each group (do not try to amalgamate different groups into one persona) and be very clear who you are designing for when developing the product. It's better to meet the needs of a small group well, rather than trying to be all things to all users (which risks failing to meet the needs of any).

Persona

Create a 1 or 2 page document setting out the details of your persona. Include all details that are relevant to the problem. What is the name of your persona? What is their age, gender, educational background, job, and income? Where do they work and when? What are their goals, ambitions and fears? What does their average day look like? Add a photograph or sketch to bring the persona to life.

Be sure to make the persona representative of a real end-user, not your ‘ideal’ end-user. At this stage, be sure to encourage diversity of thought and challenge groupthink to avoid oversight and distortions that might arise from bias.

Scenario

What is your user’s current journey with the problem? When, where and how does your persona experience the problem? How are they currently trying to solve it (if at all)? What are their pain points and needs? How will they access any solution? What are their time pressures? What will they have access to e.g. technology?

How we did it: meet Sofie… 

In preparing for the CreaTech Glossary hackathon, the teams at ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Art Futures and Simmons & Simmons worked together to create a single user persona: Sofie.

The user persona and scenario were critical to the success of the hackathon. The hackathon was a single day event, with multi-disciplinary teams who had never met each other before.ÌýTo ensure the success of the day, it was crucial that the teams could quickly and easily understand the problem at hand, the very specific needs of our target audience and the way in which information should be presented in the glossary.

To ensure that we developed the right persona we adopted the following steps:

1. User research

Online workshops were conducted with various stakeholders to identify key needs when addressing the broad problem of helping to support those in the creative sectors protect their intellectual property rights.

2. Narrow the user base

Following the initial research stage internal teams (e.g. without stakeholders) selected a key issue and user to focus on. We agreed to focus on one of the common issues coming out of our workshops - providing people who are new to the creative sector with education and information about their legal rights and risks.

3. Develop the user persona

The ¹û¶³Ó°Ôº Art Futures and Simmons & Simmons teams developed a realistic, but fictional persona Sofie.ÌýSofie is a final year design student who exhibits at her end of degree show. She has limited financial resources and little to no experience of the legal or corporate world, nor does she know any lawyers or law students. She does not recall learning much about business at design school. Sofie is nervous but keen to start her career. She's excited at the prospect of making her first sale after graduation, especially one to a large buyer who could help her to develop a global audience. Sofie uses social media – posting her designs to Instagram.

4. Develop the user scenario

Sofie sells a print at her graduation show to a buyer that works for a large fashion house. A few weeks after the sale, the fashion house emails her to suggest a meeting about collaboration. Excited, but nervous, Sofie attends the meeting where she is asked to create a print for a new collection celebrating the visual representation of music and movement. The fashion house gives Sofie a timeline of six months and offers to pay her for the production and use of the print in ‘some promotional materials’. The meeting ends with a ‘we'll continue the conversation again soon’, and Sofie leaves with a copy of the agreement in her bag and promises to read it, but it's never discussed, negotiated, or signed. One month later, Sofie hears that one of her prints is in the window of the brand’s flagship store in Paris. She recognises the print from her social media, but it's not one she created, or even started to design, for the company. In fact, Sofie never heard from them after the meeting.

5. Bring the scenario to life

Our user persona and journey were initially written as a word document. This allowed us as a team to collaborate, iterate and develop the profile more easily. You can see from the image below, that we set out the scenario graphically (as well as in writing) as this allowed us to highlight the user journey and key issues more easily, which in turn helped us to identify (in red) the glossary terms that were to be defined during the hackathon.

Having written the persona and scenario, we wanted to bring this to life in a way that would be engaging for our hackathon participants. To do this, we created a video that was played on the morning of the hackathon, providing the participants with a memorable persona that conveyed the real needs and objectives of our user. Throughout the hackathon, teams often talked of what Sofie’s needs and concerns were when considering any given term. This was also a useful prompt for mentors when supporting the teams in their work.

The end result? Meet Sofie: .