Just-Right Personas: How to Choose the Scope of Your Personas

Personas are not one-size-fits all research artifacts:  you can’t just create general user archetypes without first deciding what they are for and what the scope of their influences should be.
Personas can have a broad or narrow scope.  Consider a financial company that has multiple lines of business such as retirement savings, banking, and mutual-fund investment. The company could have personas with:

• Broad scope: If one set of personas represented the company’s customers, these personas would influence multiple areas of the business with dozens of products.
• Narrow scope: If the company created a specific set of personas to guide the redesign of its mutual-fund–management portal, these personas would have narrow focus because they would influence only one line of business.

The first question you should ask yourself is: what are these personas for?  Only after you’ve answered this question, can you determine the appropriate scope for your personas. You must also understand the tradeoffs of choosing a narrow or broad scope for your personas.  Persona success depends on knowing the tradeoffs and choosing the right tool for the job.

What often happens is that someone — a stakeholder, a client, a product manager, an account manager — will ask UX practitioners to create personas, without giving them any direction about the purpose or goal behind these personas. To those who are not well-versed in how personas are created and how they influence work, it often seems like a great idea to have one overarching set of personas that can be used for any project going forward. This approach seems to make sense, because you’ll get the most bang for your buck, and, after all, your customers and users will be the same for any current or future project. So, the same personas should be relevant for everything, right?! Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work like that. 

Persona’s Scope Impacts the Richness of Insights

It’s important to ensure the scope matches the goal for the personas, because, whatever you may gain in breadth of scope, you will pay in the richness of the insights and their influence on targeted design challenges.

The broader the scope, the shallower the data supporting those personas. It’s not realistic to find segments of customers with similar motivations, goals, information needs, attitudes, and behaviors across a broad array of situations and scenarios. The shallower the data, the less influence and benefit the personas will have for targeted decision making within the large scope.

It’s possible to find similar segments of people across a large array of products and services, but you’ll need to use fewer and more-general attributes to describe them. Therefore, broad scope personas are only useful for high-level understanding and decision making.

Coming back to our financial-company example, here are some of the characteristics of its broad-scope personas:

• They might include high-level data such as the type of savings vehicles these users might be interested in, their disposable income and ability to save, and their level of existing knowledge about ways to save for the future.
• This type of general data helps make high-level decisions such as choosing the tone of marketing messages or the type of educational content for these segments, as well as the best ways of making this content available to customers researching savings options.
• This data is not useful for targeted design decisions such as which information to display on the dashboard of the mutual-fund–trading portal to give users a high-level summary of their investment portfolio. For this design challenge, the broad personas would be too general and would not capture retirement-investment behaviors.

The smaller the scope, the richer the data. With a narrow scope, there is less context to consider and persona attributes will be directly related to a specific product or scenario. People’s behaviors and needs are influenced dramatically by the context of the product or service in question.  A targeted persona scope will allow you to find more themes in users’ motivations, goals, attitudes, and behaviors. This type of information enables teams to make specific design decisions.

Here are some of the characteristics of the narrow-scope personas for our financial company’s mobile-banking app:

• They might include detailed data such as users’ likelihood to move money around between accounts and their habits around bill-pay features.
• This data helps make targeted design decisions such as which features to expose on the homescreen for this mobile application or how to design the bill pay-workflow.
• This data is not useful for making high-level decisions such as deciding the tone of marketing messages for the organization’s product portfolio.

Structuring Personas

People often ask: What’s the right way to structure the personas for my company?  Should they have personas for the whole organization, for each line of business, for each product, or for each project? The answer is yes to all. You can have a different set of personas at each one of these levels if you want to influence decision making at that level. However, you don’t HAVE to have personas at each level. The need for personas should be situational.

To have relevant data for decision making, it’s ideal to have a set of personas to influence a specific design challenge. These personas ensure that you collect data for your specific research question and that you find themes in the user behaviors related to that context. Broad-scope personas will not meaningfully influence the design of a specific digital product such as a banking mobile app.

The Same Personas Will Not Cascade Down the Hierarchy

A common misconception is that the number of user segments and the persona identities will be the same across all the levels of scope — from most general to narrowest.  If this were the case, then we would be able to create one global set of personas that has all the information one could want for any broad or narrow design context.  However, as we already determined, it is not realistic to find segments of customers with similar motivations, goals, information needs, attitudes, and behaviors across a broad array of situations and scenarios.

Context and Purpose Drives Segmentation

User segments are determined by the context of the scope and the goal of their use. To design a mobile-banking app, you will need to address specific research questions about people’s attitudes and behaviors related to mobile banking. Additionally, you may even choose to focus your personas for a specific business purpose. For example, do you want the personas to influence the general usability and UX of the application, or are you creating them to influence an initiative to launch a new mutual-fund–investment feature within the application? As you can see, the purpose of the personas impacts the context, which, in turn,  impacts the research questions and the data you collect.

You should gather the relevant insights for your context and goal, and, then, look for clusters of similar people within that specialized dataset. The resulting personas that represent these clusters will apply only to that context.

Let’s take the financial-company example. The broadest-scope personas may be:

• Dan — the thrifty saver
• Maureen — the intellectual investor
• Charles — new to managing his money

These segments will not be the same for the mobile-banking application. There, you may even have 4 segments rather than 3:

• Luis — very focused on earning interest
• Kate — only banks on her app
• Yazmin — shares bank accounts with her husband
• Quentin — distrusts mobile transactions

An individual customer of this company may be a Dan when it comes to the company’s product offerings, but a Quentin when it comes to mobile banking.

Persona Work Always Means Educating Stakeholders

Whenever you’re asked to create personas, set yourself and your stakeholders up for success. Put in the diligence upfront so that you create the right tool for your goal:

• Always ask what your stakeholders’ goal is. Find out if your stakeholders plan to create a persona to influence one project or many projects. Do they want insight for high-level strategic decision making or for UI-design direction? If they’re unsure what they want out of the personas, work with them to identify their intentions.
• Consult with and educate stakeholders. If you find that your stakeholders’ expectations for the personas do not match what they’ve requested, help them understand why and suggest the appropriate type of personas for their goal. Explain the tradeoffs and what they should expect from the personas they requested.
• Include stakeholders in the process. Stakeholders’ participation in persona creation shows them where the information comes from and how themes in data create the resulting segments. They will also naturally feel ownership over them, having been part of the process.
• Deliver more than just the personas. Not every person who picks up the personas will know what they are and what to do with them. Include contextual information upfront, explaining how and why personas were created and what they are intended to influence. Work with the users of these assets to answer any questions that may limit their adoption and help them identify tangible ways to use them to positively influence their work.

For more about creating personas that work, we offer a full-day training course, Personas: Turn User Data Into User-Centered Design.