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 being designed for and also, to focus particular releases on a specific persona and their needs. Narrowing our focus for releases will support releasing quality and focused functionality for one persona without getting in the way of or annoying other personas.

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 can start using the pragmatic personas to practice using 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.

Presenting, our Pragmatic Personas
Thanks to everyone who helped to develop this set of pragmatic personas! It is a big job and a hard job. Without further adooo - here they are:

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.