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 we design and build for. Having a particular persona to design and build for helps teams focus on that user's need rather than defaulting to a guess, 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. This is because it helps to define specific spe

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

Where we are now with Personas
We have now iterated the pragmatic personas from feedback we received from designers, product managers, track leads and some others in a persona workshop we held in July 2015.

Also, we are 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 we learn more.