Personas are fictional characters used to represent a group of users. They are representative of the needs of the many and employ specific characteristics to make them more realistic. Personas help the team share a consistent understanding of user groups, help the team develop solutions focused on users and their needs that serve the personas, uncover universal features and develop empathy.
Personas were drafted based on a deep-dive into college statistics and data and website analytics. In addition, I facilitated a brainstorming session with leadership and subject matter experts to define audiences and organize them into groups.
Brainstorming and grouping audience attributes.
The web team used provisional personas to create Agile user stories. User stories are equivalent to requirements in waterfall development. We based each user story on personas to limit feature bloat and ensure our website features would be useful to the end-user.
One of the things I learned after the fact is that these persona-centered user stories can be called Persona Stories and that the format could be simplified to a the following format: <persona[:role]> <performs a task> [so that <unobvious goal>]
In addition to using personas for website projects, the Marketing team also adopted the personas. By educating Marketing on the benefits of personas, they were able to use them to more effectively target written communications and TV ads.