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.

Using personas
Pragmatic personas are complete and ready to use. Choose a primary persona for the product task or other functionality that you are creting concepts for, building or testing. Create user stories about a persona to be able to exercise the functionality without actually changing the basic persona. Also choose a secondary persona. The secondary persona should be someone that is not necessarily using the functionality that you are building or investigating (the feed) but may be somehow impacted by it. Also create a few user stories for the secondary persons. The primary persona is the one to focus mainly on, but also keep the secondary persona in mind as you move forward. If you have questions or thoughts, experiences with using personas (annoying, bad or good) let's talk about it on the discussion page.