I know there are many ways to build personas. Sure, you can build them on assumptions and guesses and just throw something together quickly. But actions like that just leave a bad taste I’m my mouth. I want personas to be based on research, not assumptions.

One major project I am working on now is to create personas for vehicle purchasers. Where I work, one of the products we are working on deals with the consumer automobile buying space. One things we don’t have is personas. An even bigger flow of our organization is that we are designing products without having personas to consult for our design validation. I won’t dwell on this aspect too much. Let’s just say our organization is coming to light and recognizing the importance of having personas.

My task is to build kick-ass personas. I am up for the challenge.

One of the first steps I took in building personas is to talk to several stakeholders who would have interest in these personas. I talked to designers, design leads, product managers and researchers to find out one thing:

What information do you need from a persona?

I asked a few other questions as well, but this was my primary goal in this phase of my research.  I am sharing the information about “What do stakeholders need from personas” is in the attached deck.

Persona Jennifer Blatz Stakeholders 2017