Phase: Discover

Milestone: Problem Discovery

WHAT

User archetypes based on conversations with real people.

WHY

To ground our designs in reality. Makes us consider the goals, behaviors, and pain points of people who use our design. Unlike marketing personas, design personas describe how someone accomplishes goals.

HOW to do it

1. Document Research Gather research from Discover Phase(eg User Interviews), in a way that’s easy to review. You can create placeholder personas without research to teach user-centered thinking.
2. User Archetypes Create a set of user archetypes based on how you believe people will use your solution. These typically get titles (for example, “data administrators”).
3. Expand each Archetype Analyze your research notes for patterns as they relate to user archetypes. Specifically note frequently observed goals, motivations, behaviors, & pain points.
4. Archetype to Persona Give each archetype a memorable name and a fictional account of their day. Inspired from here and here
5. Link Link your personas to the research that inspired them by annotation

Example Persona

Name: Mandy Manager

Role: Marketing Manager

Age: 32

Education: Bachelor of Arts in Communication

Status: Single

Location: West Hollywood, CA

Overview

Bio

Mandy coordinates all of the marketing as well as the publicly available content on their web page. She’s trying to find an easy contemporary way of sending personal messages to prospective leads on their various social channels.

User Stories (Role + Task + Goal) 🛠️

Responsibilities 💼

• Monitor Interactions and develop Customer Relations
• Identify and groom prospective leads across channels to leads.

Pain points 📌

• Managing Multi Channel Business presence
• Generating and Converting leads from Socials
• Getting everyone on the same page - collaborating on tasks

Core Needs 🧱