About personas and user need statements

Personas and user need statements are tools for taking a design-led approach to charity services. They exist to help you and those you work with keep your users and their needs front and central during the design process. They will provoke you to think more critically about your users.

About personas

Personas are fictional characters created to represent a user type - an archetype. Although they are fictional, and to a degree subjective, they are grounded in research. Specifically the research patterns that emerge from user interviews with real people - your users.

Personas include a precise description of a user and what they want to do. This description helps everyone involved in a project understand your users’ motivations, behaviour and characteristics.

Using personas in your design process helps you and your digital partners:

• build and maintain empathy for your users when they can’t be in the room with you

• say ‘yes’ to decisions about what to design and how it should work

• say ‘no’ to decisions

• meet the needs of the broader group of people represented by that persona.

Personas are like holiday photos, if you’ve been there they are a reminder what happened. They can help your digital partner get working more quickly, saving you time and money.

👬 👀 Look at an annotated example of a persona.

👬 👀 Look at a set of personas and user need statements together.

🔗🔗A closer look at personas by Smashing Magazine

About user need statements

User need statements are short succinct statements that describe your users’ specific needs. Like personas they are grounded in user interviews with real people. Some people call them ‘user stories’.

They are always written from your users’ point of view, and usually follow the same 3-part format:

• As a… [user type e.g. ‘person seeking mental health support’]

• I need/want/expect to… [need]

• So that… [goal or reason it's important to that person]

User need statements don’t try to describe how a problem should be solved. Instead they try to present the problem in a clear, empathy-driven way.

User need statements help you and everyone in a project understand that problem more deeply first. They do not try to describe how a problem should be solved. For this reason they are written mainly using verbs rather than nouns.

Using user need statements in your design process helps you:

• Condense research insights into your users’ specific needs in different situations

• Align everyone involved along your users’ needs and goals

• Begin identifying how you will measure the success of any solutions you create - you can ask ‘how will we know if we have accomplished this goal’?

👬 👀 Look at annotated examples of three user need statements.

👬 👀 Look at a set of personas and user need statements together.

🔗🔗 User need statements by Nielsen Norman Group.

What you can do with personas and user need statements

Use them to help you design your digital service or solution. Use them to:

• Communicate research findings

• Remind you of your users’ expectations, difficulties, behaviors and goals

• Gain a perspective similar to the user’s

• Help you decide which needs to focus on first

• Guide your ideas when you run an ideation session

• Review ideas and features e.g. ‘what would [persona name] make of this idea?’

• Build empathy and provide direction when making any design decision

Why it's good to create personas and user need statements yourself

You could pay a designer, user researcher or digital agency to do this work for you. Or even with you. But it’s good to do it yourself, from within your organisation. This is because:

• Anyone can learn the methods and processes needed to create personas and user need statements.

• You absorb the knowledge and insight from the process more deeply than if you only see the outputs

• The methods and processes you learn will help your other work. The skills involved in making personas and user need statements will help you design any service, not only a digital one.