Personas are an extremely powerful design tool, and their creation is an important part of successful website and user interface design. Personas represent a fictional model of a typical end user and are created during the projects initial research process.  

This research helps the marketing and design team to see the project from the perspective of the end user and assists in creating an overall better end result. Persona creation involves thinking about the thoughts, attitudes, behaviours and overall goals of users visiting a website. They can be created by looking at demographic research, market analysis, or focus groups to identify an idea, or perhaps several different ideas of a typical user, their motivations and characteristics. Identifying these motivations forces the design process to focus on something realistic instead of a haphazard mix of user possibilities. 

This in turn creates empathy for the end user, leading to key insights and qualitative elements that will result in an improved user experience. It may be that you come up with several different personas throughout this process, however it’s important to identify the one primary persona who is the most common user type, critical to business success, and the most needy from a design perspective. The needs of any secondary personas you may come up with will typically be met by designing for the primary persona. Once you have defined your personas you can develop scenarios based on how this user will interact with the site, from initial landing page right through to achieving goals or desired outcome. Think about the environment your persona is in, their context of use and what their goals might be. Creating scenarios will allow you to test the site structure with a more realistic approach, making the path of navigation as straightforward as possible and leading to a more robust end result. Overall persona and scenario development is instrumental to successful design, especially when a marketing or design team may not have any personal experience with the typical end user, and ensures that don’t lose sight of who are designing for throughout the projects progress. Do you have any experience with persona or scenario creation? Let us know in the comments below.