Introduced by Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, 1999) and developed by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin (The Persona Lifecycle, 2006).
Builds a few composite customers from real research, each with goals, frustrations, and habits, picks one as primary, and tests decisions against what that person would make of them.
When to reach for it
A team that keeps designing for everyone, or for itself, and needs one concrete customer to decide for.
How it runs
- Research real users through interviews and data.
- Group users by shared goals, behaviors, and frustrations.
- Write each group up as one named composite person.
- Choose one primary persona to design for first.
- Test decisions against the persona, and refresh it as data changes.
Where it sits in SOLVE eX
Go to the source
- The Inmates Are Running the Asylum, Sams, 1999
- The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design, Morgan Kaufmann, 2006