Insights

The importance of software development personas

8 Dec 2022

At Full Fat Things, we always recommend using ‘personas’ for customer projects. For the uninitiated, this might seem like a lot of bother. So I thought I’d explain what they are, why we use them and how you can get the most out of them.

Why personas are worth it

Before I get started, I’m not going to claim we invented personas. Instead, I’m writing this because I think the concept is brilliant – if used properly.

In any case, the notion of personas has been around way longer than Full Fat Things. According to Wikipedia, the first mention of ‘user personas’ was back in the 1980s. But I suspect people may have been using something similar for even longer.

What I’m more sure about is that the growth in popularity of personas has risen pretty much in parallel with that of the Internet. If you think about it, with ever more goods and services being purchased remotely, it makes sense to have a picture of your customers in mind. But where personas really come into their own is in clarifying that image for everyone in your company and provide enough detail to make sensible, actionable decisions.

What are personas?

When we pitch for software development work, one of the things we always say is that “We serve people”. Of course, pretty much every organisation serves people, either directly or indirectly. But for larger companies it’s almost impossible to know every single one of your customers well enough to feed that into your development work. The upshot of this is the need to generalise to some extent.

Personas allow you to do this in a helpful way by encapsulating all you need to know about your customers and presenting this as the characteristics of a set of fictional characters. That’s because it’s far easier to consider whether a product is going to be attractive to 34-year-old teacher Joe Bloggs and 48-year-old bus driver Mary Smith than to an audience that’s simply described as having a wide age range, a long list of job titles and a vague income bracket.

Smaller organisations can benefit from personas too. They can provide a touchstone for development that’s independent of any current customer and let you think about the customers you want as well as the ones you’ve already got.

When you create and share personas, your staff can more readily empathise with the people they’re serving. It becomes much easier to answer the questions: “What does the customer need?” and “What does the customer want?”

When should we use them?

Personas aren’t only useful at the start of a project. When we work with clients, we’ll encourage you to keep referring back to them as they’ll help you to prioritise what should be developed next. And you can keep using them after development is complete.

Also, personas aren’t static. If it makes sense to do so, they can be tweaked as together we learn more. This way they live and breathe, adding even more value to the user stories we’ll build and refer to throughout the project’s lifetime.

You can create personas for your staff as well. If they’re involved in serving customers, this is a good way to make sure their goals and challenges are taken into account too.

How do I create personas for my business?

If there’s one thing I know about personas, it’s that they only help if they contain a lot of detail. If you want to understand the expectations, concerns and motivations of your customers, you need to know far more than just their ages and job titles.

And there’s no point in creating personas if they don’t represent all your customers. That means doing proper research. This could be a mix of interviews, workshops and surveys. You can also use data collected from your existing applications. (We can help with any of this – we’ve done it lots of times, so it may be faster and more cost effective to use us. But if you’d prefer to do it yourself, let us know and we can offer guidance if it helps.)

If all of this sounds excessive, bear in mind that you can use these personas across your organisation and not just for a single project. They should become a cornerstone of your business moving forward, so they’ll provide value for a long time.

What do I need to know?

You’ll have to excuse me for stating the obvious, but just to be clear, the attributes you need to understand will vary according to the services and/or products you’re providing. What’s sometimes less obvious is you’ll be researching a mix of personal and professional details.

Among the ones we think you should consider compiling are: age, gender, marital and family status education and career overviews job title, salary, responsibilities where they get their information from individual goals, motivations, challenges and needs.

If it’s relevant, you might also want to capture information such as: company sector, products/services, turnover organisational challenges, reporting line their approach to work and managing their team.

How do I turn all this into personas?

Once you have your research data, you’ll need to condense it by looking for themes and characteristics. Remember, these need to be relevant to both your organisation and the application in question.

Next, do some brainstorming to organise all of this into groups that each represent a subset of target customers. You’ll then need to refine and prioritise the information so that you can write a description of a fictional person who encapsulates all you’ve learned about each group. And finally, it's most effective if you present it in a way that’s easy to read and absorb.

User persona examples

Generally I suggest you aim for up to five personas as there is no single definitive user persona who will represent everyone you’re targeting. And personas won’t be the same for every organisation, even in the same sector.

To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s an example. Say you were providing technical services to medium-to-large companies, here are some personas you might come up with.

First is Chief Technical Officer Dave who is 47, married with two children and commutes to London where he has overall responsibility for the IT of a £150 million turnover company. He is a risk taker but is under pressure to minimise costs. Then there’s Sam, who’s the new Head of Marketing for a £50 million turnover company based in the Midlands. He is on the lookout for new products and services to enhance the customer experience, which he has quickly identified as needing improvement. And finally there’s managing director Priya, who is also married with two children and commutes to offices in London and Berkshire. She is under pressure to maximise profits for shareholders of her £90 million turnover company and has to make tough decisions regarding budgets. They all use LinkedIn and Twitter, plus a variety of other social media and resources for work and leisure.

Ultimately, you’ll want something more detailed than this to make them really useful. For each one therefore, you should end up with something along the lines of:

  • name, job title, responsibilities and the group of users they represent
  • demographics including age and education
  • the environment they’re working or operating in
  • details relating specifically to your application, such as goals, tasks, when and where they’ll be accessing it, and the competition.

Fleshing this out with a photo and a quote really helps to bring personas to life and make them more relatable for everyone who uses them.

And then what?

You’ve created personas to help you align development with your users’ needs. The next step is that everyone involved needs to know what they are and why they matter. I really want to emphasise here how important it is to spend time and effort on this stage. Don’t just send them out via email. Talk to people, answer questions, explain why they’re valuable and how they can use them.

Once you’ve distributed them to your team(s), we at Full Fat Things can use them when we’re writing user stories, which in turn define what should happen at each step of your application – from the users’ point of view.

Then, as development continues, you and your team can use the personas to decide how to prioritise what to develop next.

Personas can also help your teams understand how different parts of the business serve customers. This is where they add extra value. It’s all too easy for teams to become compartmentalised. Talking about ‘real people’ (albeit fictional) makes it much easier for staff to see how each part of the business contributes to addressing their needs.

Pitfalls to avoid

There’s no perfect way to create personas. If there was, we’d all be using the same process. But here’s my list of things to avoid if you want to get the most out of them.

Teach people how to use personas

By the time you’ve created your personas, it will seem like a logical concept – to you. But others may have no idea what to do with them. Tell them, bearing in mind their roles and targets.

Don’t make them up 

...based on what you ‘think’ you know about your customers. Compare your view with other managers and you’ll quickly uncover some variations.

Check they aren’t too general

There may be times when company-wide personas are too broad for a specific application. That’s not helpful. If you suspect this is the case, take positive action and consider creating a new subset for that project.

Don’t distribute them digitally 

...and assume people will refer to them. Often, they won’t. Find ways to present the results to everyone in person. And then provide physical versions that people can decorate their offices with.

Get buy-in from the top

If the board and senior management don’t understand what you’re doing and/or champion the idea, the trickle-down effect will soon mean others won’t bother with them either. This can be a significant challenge. Address it by explaining the benefits to the organisation. Then ask them to share their expertise by getting involved in the research.

Don’t create them in isolation

If you suddenly present them to your organisation as a done deal, you risk alienating some of your staff who either don’t understand them or don’t agree with them. And then they won’t get used. Find ways to let people know what you’re doing and contribute to their development.

How to get started

Before I sign off, I’d like to recommend a great resource, which is the UK Government’s digital service manual – and particularly the User research section. It’s a good place to start if you’re looking to build user-centred software.

Then come and talk to us. We can give you examples of how we’ve used personas for our customers and what they’ve helped us achieve.