Introducing Personas Without Causing a Panic

I've found that If I'm not careful about presenting the persona concept, clients can get a little jumpy.  They start saying sentences that start with "But What About . . ." and proceed to describe a specific client in minute detail.  So I've decided that personas need to be approached gently. 

Once people are bought into the concept, then you can start to create and prioritize the personas.  Here are some things to say before you introduce your persona process:

• Personas are named representations of characteristic and story combinations. They are archetypes, like Cinderella or Robin Hood or Peter Pan.
• Priority personas for a website may be different from the priorities for the organization as a whole.
• Persona creation is not about limitation, it is about representation. Behind each persona are thousands of individuals with some or many shared characteristics with each of the main personas. The goal is to design for the characteristics, not for the representations.
• By creating personas, we give names and faces to these characteristics, so that they can be discussed and planned for more succinctly while maintaining tangibility. It is easier to call a story a “Cinderella” story than to describe all of the unique aspects of a person’s history. In the same way, it is easier to say “Matt and Heather” than “Young tech-savvy couple with small children seeking a sense of community.”
• Personas are used to clarify the relationship between the website and organizational goals. The process assumes that those goals are known and agreed on.
• There are dozens of secondary personas, but their characteristics are largely reflected in the primary.  Primary personas give us an initial starting point but we can do iterations that are focused on other personas once a strong website is established.

(first published May, 2010)