Persona

What is a Persona?

Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.

Creating personas helps you to understand users’ (or customers’) needs, experiences, behaviors and goals.

The Interaction Design Foundation has a perfect explanation of why you should create personas for your product, and what you will be able to learn from them.

How to use a Persona in positioning

Here, we use personas, too! But in our context, a persona represents someone to whom we want to tell a story. A story that talks about your product or service, with its benefits, qualities, features, etc.

This is how to do it:

1. Drag and drop a "Persona" box onto a diagram on a board in your project, using the palette of available symbols near the edge of the diagram.
2. Click on the title of the Persona box and name the persona, as if it were the role name of the person you want to talk to.

How to connect a Persona to a Story

In this diagram, you see a persona called "Solopreneur", to whom we want to tell a story called "Build a launchpad".

Connect the Persona to one or more previous boxes from the left, usually one or more stories you want to tell to/about that persona.

Pick one of the outgoing connectors (the black bubble on the right edge of each box). Click and drag a line towards the incoming connector of your Persona box (the black bubble on the left edge of the Persona).