We’ve been using personas at the University of Arizona Libraries for a good while as design and communication tools for different projects. I’ve learned a lot from our different attempts at persona development, so wanted to share my learnings here. In particular, how we’ve collaboratively created personas, leading to buy-in and shared ownership across the organization.
Previous personas
I believe it was 2011 when we first tinkered in persona development. But we made several missteps on our first attempt. We:
- based them on assumptions (rather than research)
- created them in isolation (by the 4-person Website Steering Group of the time)
- used stock photos and stereotypes
They were pretty silly and simplistic, and didn’t really help us build empathy for our users. I remember the donor persona, in particular, was inspired by Daddy Warbucks and became more of a joke than an actual tool for our conversations.
In 2014, we gave it another go. This time, we created personas specific to our Website Redux project where we were re-designing the digital user experience. We based them on data, including web analytics, usability testing, and surveys. We shared them with the library at a “Meet Our Personas” open house event.
These became much more useful, particularly as we incorporated them into the Redux project. We used them in:
- User stories, the framework for all web development work (e.g. “Cheyenne wants to reserve a room from her smart phone.”)
- Content planning, as we associated every new or revised web page with particular persona(s)
- Project updates, as we held monthly brown bags and used them as a basis for much of our work
We also distinguished between our primary and secondary audiences. We had 4 primary personas:
- Cheyenne, the freshman
- Brandon, the PhD student
- Emily, the graduate student and teaching assistant
- Renee, the faculty member
And 3 secondary personas:
- Donald, the potential donor
- Elle, the library staff member
- Craig, the community user
2018 Persona Project
Context
Come 2018, a number of things had changed. Our content strategist who provided leadership in persona development, Shoshana Mayden, left for another position on campus. We had hired a new content strategist, Kenya Johnson, who also played the role of marketing and communications manager. I had moved out of the technology unit into our administration, providing vision for our UX work library-wide. We also realized that hey, it’s 2014, and Cheyenne the freshman is graduating.
Most of the library staff were familiar with personas. In addition to having used the 2014 personas for several years in the context of our website, we’d also had a design thinking project in late 2017 that gave library employees the experience of creating their own student and faculty personas. This design thinking project also gave us a wealth of new user research data.
So in spring 2018, Kenya and I started working on developing new personas that could be used library-wide.
Intention
We wanted the new personas to be a bit different. We wanted them to:
- Be useful and adaptable for different project needs
- Be inclusive and diverse
- Avoid stereotyping
We identified the purpose of personas as design and communication tools that:
- consider the users’ perspective and experience, not ours
- help us understand our audience
- encourage us to question our assumptions
- ensure we focus on what matters to people and has the most impact
- provide a useful foundation and starting point for any project
We wanted personas to help us:
- describe and empathize with our target audience
- get on the same page about who we are designing for
- guide decisions related to services, products, content, design, and more
Workshops
We invited all library staff to attend collaborative workshops to build our personas. We held multiple workshops at different times to allow people to attend no matter their work schedule.
We ultimately had 35 attendees including people from varied departments including technology, access services, research and learning, health sciences, and marketing. In the first 1-hour workshop, we:
- reviewed design thinking personas
- conducted mock user interviews
- identified behaviors, motivations, and constraints of particular user types
In the second 2-hour workshop, we:
- created teams; created goals, behaviors, constraints for 5 personas
- identified names, quotes, and photos for personas
- presented personas to the larger group in a creative way
Our new personas
Informed by the outcomes of the workshop, we created the following primary personas:
- Nate the navigator
- Sam the scholar
- Isaiah the instructor
- Linda the learner
And secondary personas:
- Esmeralda the explorer
- Evan the employee
One of the main shifts from our previous set of personas was that these were structured around purpose rather than status. We had discovered over the past few years that many of our services weren’t geared specifically to a demographic such as undergraduates, graduate students, or faculty members. Rather, they were geared towards an audience based on their purpose.
Our research services serve all researchers, whether they are faculty, staff, students, or visiting scholars. Our instructional services serve all instructors, whether they are teaching assistants, faculty, or adjunct faculty.
When consulting with staff on projects, such as research support services, we’d often hear things like, “Well, it could be a PhD student or a faculty member, or maybe even an undergraduate.” So we’d often end up with three or four personas listed as an audience for a service, which was less helpful. So we shifted from thinking about students vs. faculty members and started thinking about learners vs. scholars. And recognized that depending on context, an individual could play the role of different persona identities throughout their experience with the library. Someone might be working on a class assignment in the morning, teaching a course in the afternoon, and navigating library spaces in the evening. We’ve found this to be a much more helpful framing.
Rollout and training
Kenya and I presented the final personas to our library leadership team, encouraging them to use them in upcoming projects and to share them with staff. We also provided hands-on training to departments upon their request. In one-hour training sessions, we presented the personas and had people break into small groups. They worked through a Project Starter where they came up with a project (usually a real one), identified their primary persona(s), adapted them as needed, and thought through how the persona would help guide their design and communication decisions.
We were hopeful that by developing the personas collaboratively and through the hands-on training sessions, people across the library will find them useful in their daily work.
Adoption and adaption
Since launching the personas, they’ve proved helpful for a variety of projects, including the design of new websites, tutorials, and services. The staff who attended the workshops are also now equipped to develop personas whenever they find them useful.
I’ve probably found our new personas most useful as a starting point. Project teams will take one of the personas and adapt it to best fit their purposes. Since these were created in Powerpoint, they are easy to update to fit a particular need. By providing complete personas as well as adaptable template, we’re helping empower staff to place users at the center of their projects, informing their conversations and their decision making.
