In this video, we'll discuss the process for actually gathering the information you need and constructing a persona. From our five W's of a persona. We'll be looking at where to get good information to construct your persona and how to transform that information into a usable persona. The process we'll be using has been adapted from the process first outlined by one of the fathers of modern design, the legendary Alan Cooper. Back in 1998, Cooper published the book, the inmates are running the asylum, which first introduced the use of personas as an interaction design tool. His instructions for how to create a persona remain relevant to this day.

Here's Allen's process for building a persona. identified behavioral variables from interviews. Map interview subjects to behavioral variables, identify significant behavioral patterns across users, synthesize characteristics and relevant goals. Check redundancy and completeness, expand descriptions of attitudes and behaviors designate persona types. I'm a stickler for completeness. But I feel it goes without saying that the process only really begins after you've done some extensive user research, or at least have some user research to draw upon.

Similarly, we might reframe Alan's process as follows. What behavior was common across users? Who amongst our user set exhibited similar behavior patterns? What distinct user group clusters do we have? How or in what ways are these user groups distinct? Is there any overlap across the group's goals and needs?

Can we bring these composites to life? Who then are separate personas? We've already met Sherry, one of our personas for the hi mon app. How did we compile our user research come up with her? Let's refresh ourselves from the preliminary user research that was used to launch our app. You can see it wasn't a very extensive study, as is often the case in startup land dia.

Only nine interviews with four of those users also conducting diary studies. Demographic doesn't seem particularly diverse, but it looks as if the team had made some assumptions which they were testing with this research that their target audience would be young busy professionals. There are a number of different ways of codifying findings from user research, which is outside of the scope of this course, but which I plan to discuss in more detail in another course on user research methods. However, for the purposes of identifying and articulating various user models that can be used to create personas, behavioral mapping, where you literally map your users across various spectrums of behavior, I find is the easiest way to see how your users are grouped. Use the categories or dimensions that make most sense, given the data in your User interviews, the problem space you're trying to solve for and the particular ambitions or hypotheses your team is trying to test.

Use as many categories as seem relevant or fit your data. Remember, this is only a tool for you to use to help make sense of your user data for yourself and your stakeholders. There's no perfect or right way to do it. It depends on the situation. You can see that the Hi mom app was curious about how social media savviness and career ambitions played a role and who might be interested in using their service. Given the nine users We spoke with for this study, we found a range of behaviors across the various dimensions we've chosen.

We can sort of see some clusters, but it just isn't really clear what we're seeing until we map which user interviews seem to cluster together. users to and users three seem to have an awful lot in common, not everything but enough that they really stood out from the data. We gathered, we particularly noticed them because they were so much more family oriented than the rest of all of our other interviewees. The hi mon app looked like it would be a really good fit for their goals. We use their composite interview data to construct our Sherry persona. Seems straightforward enough.

Another set of users also stood out as having distinct needs for users one, eight and nine. They were labeled as social media phobic not because they didn't know how to use social media, but rather because they were exhausted of having to use it in order to keep in touch with their friends and family. In many ways, looking at them along these behavioral maps. They almost seem like the opposite of the Sherry persona type. But what came through in their interviews was while they didn't feel stressed or pressured to stay connected to loved ones, they did self identify as introverts, and were curious to see if technology could support them in forming deeper connections with friends and family. They're opening they're open to Having a different offering for how to stay better connected could make them a good fit for Hi mom.

So we can think of them as another potential set of target users distinct from arch from Sherry, our first set. The last possible group to stand out was represented by user six. She loves social media and really doesn't think of it as a hassle. Like our other two persona types do. In fact, she seemed to love connecting on social media. She has like what 10,000 followers amazing, and she seems happy and well supported by the existing social media apps out there and doesn't seem stressed about connecting with loved ones.

So in reality, she's not a good candidate for our target audience, which is super helpful to learn. She may be represented in a demographic population we're looking to cater to, and she isn't part of the target audience of our app. Knowing that she's out there is helpful because she may crop up from time to time Identifying her And importantly, identifying how she's different from our target audience, we can stay focused on our real targets, sharing one. revisiting our research hypothesis, it looks like we have some evidence, maybe not necessarily conclusive or exhaustive, but evidence nonetheless, that high man's target audience are busy young professionals, we've been able to identify who isn't our target audience, which is almost just as helpful because it will prevent us from chasing after a customer base that is already well served by other options. So just to wrap up, we've used Alan Cooper's amended process for creating personas by mapping the behaviors identified in our user research to find distinct user groups for our target audience.

Taking the composite of their experience, responsibilities, goals and pain points into the composite personas, then help us serve them better. It's helpful to identify both who Our user groups are our shares and bonds, and who our target audience is not all those Jessica's out there. Now you have the tools you need to begin building your own personas. Let's take a look at that class project.