Personas for product development

Why Personas?
The Wikimedia Design Research team is working on a set of building a set of personas as a tool for product development. The purpose of these personas is to expand the type of users the Wikimedia Foundation design and build for. Having a particular persona to design and build for helps teams focus on that user's need/s, and can save time by avoiding back and forth conversations about what "the user" wants or needs. Also, focusing a release on a specific persona's needs and a specified set of functionality can potentially streamline product development, and support high quality releases.

How are Pragmatic Personas different than Personas?
Pragmatic personas are a set of personas built quickly from what we (the team building these pragmatic personas) know (self report surveys, academic research, and quantitative data) and being honest about what we don't. The benefit of pragmatic personas is that they can be created more quickly than personas based on persona research (qualitative research triangulated with any segmentation that is available). Some product teams at WMF have started using the pragmatic personas in product development while the Design Research team is doing deeper persona research to develop a more solid set of personas based on primary persona research. We (the team building personas) will learn more about what is useful for our teams in personas, and how best to use them as we go.

Current state of personas
We (the team building personas) have now (as of late November, 2015) iterated the pragmatic personas from feedback received from designers, product managers, track leads and some others in a persona workshop held in July 2015.

Also, the Design Research team is doing ongoing persona research (in the form of interviews about people's technology, access to internet, relationship with Wiki, what they are interested in, their challenges and things that excite and inspire them) to iterate our pragmatic personas into well researched personas based on qualitative research. Personas will be evolving incrementally as more of these interviews are conducted.