Step 1: Group Interview Subjects By Role

We started creating personas for our consumer-facing app by grouping our interview subjects by role. Our interviewees were labeled in our affinity diagram and throughout the clustering process according to their role in relation to our product (for example, Existing User 1 translated to EU 1). Each team member was assigned a role to use for behavioral variable creation.

Step 2: Identify Behavioral Variables

Each team member brainstormed a list of distinct behavioral variables for each role. The accompanying images of the bulleted lists show an example of this, including the activities, attitudes, aptitudes, motivations, and skills for "Existing User" and "New User" roles. We met together as a team to review and refine each list.

Step 3: Map Interview Subjects to Behavioral Roles

Using the variables for each role, we derived a list of the significant behaviors that would be used to generate a scale. Using this scale, we mapped the interview subjects against each variable. We broke this up as a team by first mapping the users we originally interviewed. Then, we created a duplicate board of scales in which we color-coded the users by job role. Once we completed the scale mappings, we met again to discuss and slightly adjusted the placement of some subjects so that they more accurately reflected the relative position to other subjects. See below for the first and second boards we created.

Step 5: Synthesize Characteristics to Define Goals

For the 6 patterns, we began to shape a persona from our research. We defined activities, motivations, pain points, demographics, skills, attitudes, emotions, and their interactions with people and product. We also grabbed direct quotes to help us start framing their narrative and came up with a one-liner catch phrase that captured their essence. For this step, each team member was assigned one or two clusters to work on and brainstormed the details as a list of bullet points.

Step 6: Check for Completeness and Redundancy

In our next team meeting, we discussed the data in more detail and significantly refined each others' lists. At this point, we also began to name the personas using a random name generator and even pulled some preliminary images to help visually represent some of the significant attributes of each persona. We checked for completeness to make sure that the personas truly captured a unique end user. We found that some of the users might have similar goals, but their experiences, skills, and attitudes made them different enough that they were truly a supplemental persona. This tweaking stage was a more significant part of our process than we originally thought it would be.

Step 7: Designate Persona Types

This step went hand-in-hand with Step 6. During our team discussion, we found that by modifying and refining our personas, we were also able to prioritize them by understanding if their needs were truly different or would be captured by another persona already.

It was clear to all of us that the primary persona we would design for is Lindsey. Many of her characteristics and goals were directly related to all of the other personas. By designing for Lindsey, the other personas would at least be acceptably satisfied. The secondary personas had a couple of key characteristics that would not be captured by Lindsey's needs. The remaining personas were deemed supplemental because they were captured by the primary and secondary personas.

Step 8: Expand the Description of Attributes and Behaviors

Based on our persona write-ups, we created dashboards for each persona to give an overview of the most important details. As a group, we identified 5 characteristics that developed a distinct sense of identity for each persona (Tech Savvy, Social Media, Maintenance Level, Online Purchasing, and Familiarity with Drive-ins). These characteristics were also identified as ones that would be important in helping direct our prototype design direction. We added them to the dashboard in the form of visual scales. Additionally, we added relevant demographic details, a biographical narrative, pain points, end goals, experience goals, life goals and the catch phrases we had come up with for each persona. You can view the completed dashboards below.