MANAGERIAL SKILLS
The power of personas
- Create products or services that meet people's needs
- Adopt a user-centric design process
HOW TO
Good product design centers on people, namely the end users of whatever is being designed. Publications, conferences, communication campaigns, social work, humanitarian projects, and public services are no different: They disappoint when they are not designed around the specific needs, aspirations, constraints, and agency of the groups they target. In fact, this user-centered approach is essential for any kind of initiative to succeed.
Part of the solution lies in “user personas,” a powerful method drawn from manufacturing and software development. User personas are fictional characters that represent a group of real people. These characters are fleshed out: They come with a plausible name and portrait, along with occupations, behaviors, beliefs, and character traits that are common within the group they represent. Most importantly, personas pose interesting challenges. End users may be typically busy, distracted, unequipped, skeptical, or handicapped in one way or another. They also have agency, which they use, and which we must take into account when designing a product or a service for them.
Personas pose interesting challenges
Below is an example of user personas developed by Synaps to capture the challenges that migrant domestic workers face in Jordan. This set covers a range of likely situations, which workers attempt to navigate in their own ways. As such, they help us empathize and, from there, imagine possible interventions that would build on what migrant workers aspire to or already do, rather than make assumptions about their needs.
Personas thus enable us to center the experience and strategies of the people we design for: the audience of a message, the users of an object, the recipients of a service. This is particularly relevant when working with groups whose voices are usually absent from the discussions that affect them. In the civic sector, personas may support a more local, informed approach to aid recipients. They would similarly benefit many policymaking processes that tend to ignore the citizens at stake.
How do you construct these characters? First, they must be grounded in research about real people. Although personas are fictional, they must reflect journeys, problems, and strategies that resonate with the target group. The best way to test that is to try them out on the latter, to see what strikes them as credible and what comes across as false, exaggerated, insensitive, or cliché. Personas should feel like a story into which such people can project themselves, because they represent experiences that they have already faced or can imagine themselves facing in the future.
Second, personas are simple and succinct. They contain only a few, standard components: a personal profile, a problem statement, and existing strategies.
The personal profile is some combination of a portrait, a name, a description, a set of values, and a quote. It’s essential to include sufficient “flesh” to elicit empathy, while keeping the character generic enough to be representative of a group. Any superfluous detail must be removed.
New solutions must contend with existing ones
The problem statement focuses on a challenge that the design process ambitions to resolve. For any given intervention, we create a well-rounded set of personas that covers all the challenges we want to prioritize.
The existing strategies represent the partial, “make-do” solutions that a person is likely to have found to their own problems. Some personas may also list frustrations and potential selling points, to show how people are muddling through while aspiring to better options.
The final element is key, because any new solution that you propose must contend with existing ones. Synaps developed the following user personas around financial management problems, bearing in mind that people already manage money, but they often do so ineffectively.
Personas are practical tools meant to be used and adapted. They can go up on the wall of a meeting room, to ensure that end users are considered in discussions that concern them. They may support role-playing exercises, in which staff members assume the personality and instincts of such characters, looking at problems through their eyes. They are ideal icebreakers in workshops involving end users themselves. And they can help with fundraising or reporting too, as a way of bringing life to a topic, while protecting the identity and privacy of the concerned.
Personas are relatively commonplace in some fields, notably software development, marketing, and some corners of object design and learning design. By contrast, their power is mostly ignored in policymaking, the civic sector, and the social sciences. Those working on knowledge production and social services, however, have every reason to center their efforts on their end users. Unleash the power of personas where they are likely to do the greatest good!
18 July 2025
Illustration credit: Donald M. Genaro by Wikipedia / licensed by CC.
