User Personas? Why do we need them? How to create them?

[nelsonic]

Every project needs a Persona to help the people on the team (working on making the product) to contextualise, empathise and focus on the needs/goals/pains of the person using the product/service.

The general format is:

• Name + Picture
• Details
• Goal

Though I quite like the addition/inclusion of "Pain Points" e.g: via: https://www.uxpin.com/studio/blog/ux-designers-5-minute-guide-lean-personas

I would especially like to see the inclusion of a quantifiable pain point e.g: using a scale: via: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2018/02/28/pain-points

There is a mention of Personas in https://github.com/dwyl/product-owner-guide but it is not "formalised" into a "how to create personas" which is a "gap".

@Cleop please take the lead on this. Your creative skills and iPad Pro are perfect match for creating Persona Cards illustrations.

The "MVP" of this is "enough" personas for CS: https://github.com/club-soda/club-soda-guide/issues/93 But we would like to develop a tool for generating "persona cards" in the future. Which could be a 20% time project or even a product in it's own right. Every project we have worked on should have had clearly defined persona cards up-front. 🥇 Only a handful of (past) projects have them ... 😞 ALL future projects will have them. 💎

Todo

• [x] #Meta: Craft a how-to-create-personas.md (initial guide) to creating Persona Cards using the CS Personas as the examples. (don't worry too much about a "general" audience understanding the CS personas, we will update the examples for the @dwyl app in the near future, but for now, we need to get this done in the context of the client project, which thankfully, is Open Source!)

• [x] Create a Person Card for each of the "users" of the CS app: https://github.com/club-soda/club-soda-guide/issues/93

  Note: initially we only need one Persona for consumers; we can create more as required.

  • [x] Sketch a simple avatar/character for each Persona. e.g:

• [x] Prepare a JPEG of each Persona that we can print and have on our respective wall.

  Note: We will use the JPEG/PNG of the persona in the Digital Documentation, but having a physical print is an incredibly useful visual reminder for Product Owner, UX Designer/Tester and Developers to refer to when writing user stories,

  • [x] Assemble the JPEGs into a PDF for distribution and printing.

@iteles please add to this list as required. thanks.

[Cleop]

[nelsonic]

@Cleop this is superb work. (so far) 😍 (I knew you would ace this!!) 🎉 🦄

Consider keeping the format/order the same:

• Pain
• Goals
• Motivations ("Why"?)

[nelsonic]

@Cleop / @iteles I'm beginning to think that this could/should be a dedicated repo: e.g: "/learn-how-to-create-user-personas" (or whatever you prefer!) so that it's not "hidden" within a "process..." (which few people will bother to read) I consider this a pretty core/fundamental skill/step in a developer's personal learning because developing empathy for the end-user is essential to the success of all projects, and is something that is relevant to the entire community (not just people following @dwyl's "processes"...)

Thoughts?

[Cleop]

@nelsonic - I've updated the images above to now be ordered in the same way.

[iteles]

Oops, closed by mistake on mobile 😬

[nelsonic]

@Cleop this file https://github.com/dwyl/process-handbook/blob/master/how-to-create-personas.md is a good start. 👍 I still feel that "burying" this guide in "process-handbook" is list hanging a Monet in your closet. Nobody will see it here! Please consider moving it to it's own repository so that people can discover it, or at least linking to it from https://github.com/dwyl/learn-user-experience-testing ...

Did you create a template that people can easily follow? and a few sample images of personas people can use for their own projects? Both of these things would be really good to add to the end of the guide. Thanks! ✨

[nelsonic]

PR #153 contains the Template to create new personas. :shipit: Already in use in https://github.com/dwyl/app/issues/213#issuecomment-650531694 ✅