Design personas are a stable part of our UX toolkit. They help us keep the audience in perspective and communicate their needs. Personas naturally evolve throughout a project as we gain more knowledge through user research - but where do we start before we have research? Proto-personas are not a substitute for research informed personas, but they do help us to quickly document audience assumptions around persona types, goals and frustrations. Making persona creation a collaborative activity allows us to extract stakeholder knowledge and assumptions around the audience to gain a collective understanding and achieve stakeholder buy-in to our process from the project outset.

1. Proto-personas
Friday 10th June 2016
collaboratively.
How to make
Joanne Rigby
User Experience Director
@joanneux #uxscot

2. “If you design for everyone,
you delight no one. That is
the recipe for a mediocre
product.
Alan Cooper

3. representatives
Personas are
of our users
(based on research)

4. Proto-personas
(AKA Provisional personas, ad-hoc personas)

5. Why proto-personas are great
● Fast to produce
● Start the project as we mean to go on (user needs inform
decisions)
● Avoiding ‘designing for everyone’
● Discover assumptions and misconceptions

6. Proto-personas give us a
shared understanding,
not insight

7. How to make
Proto-personas

8. Our client:
Well known,
Cinema chain
Fast proto-persona activity

9. 1. Freelist every
type of user

10. 2. Post-it note
goals/needs

11. 3. Group our goals

12. 4. Name your groups

13. In groups:
1. Review the copy of your post it notes
2. Use post-it notes to complete the
persona template
15mins
Activity
Complete persona template

14. In groups:
1. Present your persona to another group
2. Agree together what the final post it
notes will be adding and removing
post it notes
5mins per group
Activity
Feedback

15. 1. Freelist every type of user (our inspiration list)
2. Post it note goals/needs
3. Group our goals
4. Name your groups
5. Complete proto-persona templates
...then research
Steps to collaborative proto-persona
creation

16. Your turn
We’d love to see your workshop photos
using the template
Find the template here:
http://orangeb.us/obpersona
Send us a tweet @orangebus

17. Thanks
Joanne Rigby
User Experience Director
joanne@orangebus.co.uk
@joanneux
@orangebus
Persona Template
http://orangeb.
us/obpersona