Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of articles on the persona creation process, debating the merits (or lack) of personas, contrasting the different research methods applied, through to beauty parades of how a persona is documented.
Often what gets overlooked is the art of adoption. How do you ensure that any in-depth research you invested in creating the personas gets integrated in to your design work and you don’t simply end up with a document that sits gathering dust? My cynical self has witnessed persona creation as a checkbox in a so-called customer-led design process, with no real appetite to ensure they play a pivotal role in the design of something useful.
We need to talk more about how we ensure that our personas are adopted. I don’t just mean noise in the twittersphere or rambling posts such as this, but as a step in each project’s experience design process. Ouch!
Defining your Persona adoption plan & tactics should be a key step right from the outset of your persona creation process. Do not be afraid to include it in your plan – it’s essential. This won’t take long or bust the budget, but it’s important to put this topic high up on the project’s agenda to drive the value that personas will deliver if embraced and adopted by all the stakeholders.
There are three parts to this:
• Format and style of the deliverables
• Key success criteria for the chosen format
• Rollout plan for communicating the personas to your stakeholders
First up you need to agree on the format for communicating the persona. Anyone that stands by his or her persona document template regardless is doomed to fail. We need to understand the needs and behaviours of the stakeholders too, to document the persona in a way that is compelling, memorable, and most importantly – one that they will use.
With a format chosen, be it poster, document or video – you need to identify what criteria to evaluate this deliverable by. All that Infographic trickery that is creeping in to personas doesn’t necessarily create an engaging and compelling story. How you ensure you achieve a realistic quality by using say, a first voice narrative, is essential. You also need to have these conversations upfront to ensure you organize the appropriate resources. For example, which storyteller supremo will be adding a sprinkling of fairy dust to make your persona narrative more compelling? I’ll pen a separate post on this to discuss some interesting work I’ve been doing to improve Persona Recollection.
When the documents have been carefully crafted to represent the personas, typically they get emailed around the team and/ or dumped on the project portal. Maybe they also get stuck on the walls. That’s not good enough. You need to work hard to ensure they are effectively communicated to all stakeholders. I recently heard of one company hosting a Mr. & Mrs. type quiz over a boozy after-hours meal to communicate their personas. The next day as the team shrugged off their hangovers they could recollect the personas in intimate detail! Be creative in what you do to ensure the entire team really take them to heart, not just you! This doesn’t happen by chance, you need to plan for this.
It’s simple. Before you jump straight in to the persona creation process, stop and plan what needs to be done to ensure they are effectively communicated and adopted by the team.
