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.

Where we are now with Personas
Currently the Design Research team is iterating our pragmatic personas from feedback we received from designers, product managers, track leads and some others in a persona workshop we held in July 2015. Once our iteration is complete, we will post those pragmatic personas here.

At the same time, we have started persona research. We are currently interviewing people who are new to contributing. We are just at the start, and will make reports as we have information to share.