Don’t have time to create formal personas? Build rough ones and iterate
Like other design processes, personas can be improved with iteration
I had to adopt a quicker way to create user personas when I worked for a HealthTech startup.
Personas are often the work of a lot of user research to understand your target users and can often be a lengthy process. As a result, you may often end up in "Gray areas," like when other team members assure me that my personas are good, but I never get to validate them.
So when I joined a much faster work environment, I knew I needed to create design artifacts like personas without spending much time on them. I found my answer to this problem in the book Lean UX.
It's a method that starts with something that many UX practitioners frown on: proto-personas.
Estimate, validate, and iterate your proto-personas
In case you're unaware, proto-personas are personas built with essentially no field research. In many cases, it's a team sitting down and voicing their assumptions about users to establish a user profile for which they're creating their product.
That description should tell you why proto-personas are not that favored compared to other personas, which often invest significantly more time into user research.
However, they do have two advantages:
If the team isn't motivated to build personas, it's better than nothing
This option can save an immense amount of time.
The second reason is the primary factor that Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden focus on in their book, Lean UX. Instead of investing many hours upfront to build the user persona through rigorous user research, they advocate for iterating quickly on proto-personas.
This is an iterative three-step process:
Have your team present their assumptions together to form user proto-personas
Conduct ongoing research to validate or disprove your assumptions
Iterate on your assumptions to form better user personas
This approach has several advantages. The first is that the personas are organically created with your team, which means you have the flexibility to be wrong. Second, personas are often regarded as "untouchable," especially if they are built by third parties. As a result, if you find mistakes with your assumptions, you can correct them without many issues.
In addition, these personas are often living design artifacts for longer, which means they're less likely to end up as museum pieces that people ignore.
Here's how to conduct this process.
Have a knowledge dump with your team about personas
Ideally, you'd be able to get your team together in a workshop or meeting, where you and your team would spend time sitting around and voicing everyone's assumptions about their users to build something together.
However, that doesn't always happen. So another alternative is to do an asynchronous's knowledge dump. This is where we sit down with one subject matter expert or team member to discuss your user in-depth. Then, you create a proto-persona, based on that, and then showcase that to your team where they can critique, comment, and improve it.
The most important thing to understand is that no matter how knowledgeable your team is, all you have right now is a collection of biases and assumptions. It would help if you still validated your assumptions with research, as there are probably many blind spots. One of the most common examples of this is with new users.
Asking team members, who may have worked with a product for decades to imagine the new user experience, often leads to wildly inaccurate ideas of how much new users will know about the product in general. This is why it's necessary to talk with your team: one member's assumptions can be clarified by voicing them to the rest of the team.
After gathering these assumptions, it's time to validate them.
Validate your assumptions, however you can
The gold standard for validating your assumptions is by talking with users. However, sometimes there are issues with this: one such case, when working in Healthcare, is that my users are incredibly busy. Therefore, it didn't make sense for me to put UX research on hold for the two weeks (on average) it took to talk with my users.
In that case, you can look at a couple of other places, depending on what you're looking for.
Validate user demographics and engagement through Analytics
One of the designers' most powerful but underutilized resources is Analytics tools, such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel. Your company almost always has these accounts because it's something necessary for other aspects of the business to do its job.
From C-level executives looking at the dashboards to product managers looking at KPIs to developers looking at page loading times, Google analytics is almost always required in today's modern business to understand the numbers associated with your products and organization.
Just looking at a small subset of these analytics is often enough to illustrate and validate whether or not your users are running into issues. For example, analytics is often the first stop to look at typical user demographics, such as age range, gender, and more of who users are.
However, looking at Analytics for user behavior and engagement statistics is more valuable.
These may include questions like:
Are there more new or existing users?
How long do users spend on average on your site?
Where are the first places they click, and are they not clicking somewhere?
Etc.
However, this can't tell you everything about your need for personas, especially their needs, goals, and tasks.
Validate through past user tests
If you have spreadsheets of older users from past user tests, these are often ideal for understanding who your users are. There's probably some demographic information, but there's also stuff like their role, how long they have been at that particular job and their levels of technical expertise.
It's implausible that many of these user groups no longer target customers or users for your products. In addition, looking into past research can often provide additional insights you might not be aware of.
Validate through other members of your organization outside of the team
One last option is to validate with other organization members that are not working on your project. They may not know exactly your project's purpose, but if they've worked in your domain, they may have exciting insights without the bias of currently working on a specific project.
One such ideal group is to talk with customer support: after all, they're the ones listening to users complain about problems or other pain points.
In any case, these methods will help you validate whether you're on the right track or if you've made some errors along the way. With that in mind, it becomes easier to iterate and get the next, more accurate version of your personas.
Iterative rough personas are better than unfinished, formal ones
Even if your personas are rough, sometimes it's better to have a proto-persona you can iterate on versus something unfinished.
Personas are often best as living design artifacts. However, you might not always have the time to develop a persona in a quicker working environment fully.
So if you ever found yourself in that gray area, where your personas are unverified, but your team members want you to move on with the design, try this method. You might find, as you iterate, that you're able to pivot with additional user insights that you might not be able to with formalized processes.
Kai Wong is a Senior UX Designer and a top Design Writer on Medium. His new book, Data-informed UX Design, explains small changes you can make regarding data to improve your UX Design process.