PERSONAS

Paradigm-stretching methods

The personas method is a tool for design and development that helps to better understand the needs, motivations and behaviours of target groups. The method is based on creating persona types from research and observation data. Personas represent typical users of green transition related solutions, customers or other key stakeholders. In the context of the green transition, personas help to concretise different roles related to development of environmental practices and policies. Using personas can make visible, for example, positive change actions and resistance related to the development of environmental solutions in a health and care organisation.

What is required:

• Openness to adopt different perspectives created through personas, such as values, needs and basic assumptions.
• Prior preparatory work by the facilitator, where personas are built based on background information and research.
• Clear questions from the facilitator, to be answered using personas.

Level of difficulty: 2 (the facilitator must do thorough preparatory work)

Time required: 40-90 minutes with participants

Materials:

• Persona descriptions
• Paper, pens, post-it notes, or a digital work platform

Participants: 8-20

How to use:

• Background research: The facilitator conducts prior preparatory research and analyses the stakeholder groups related to the development task. Media data, interviews, surveys or observations, for example, can be used to understand user groups.
• Defining the goal: Define why personas are used to verbalise different perspectives and what the group wants to understand better together.
• Discussion using personas: Discuss various persona characters and consider the possibilities and problems of developing environmental solutions through them.
• Description and concretisation: Identify the relationship of different personas to the environmental solutions and the development of environmentally friendly solutions and practices.
• Use and application: Personas are used to support idea generation, designing and developing solutions for the green transition.

When to use:

• At the early stages of design of solutions, when there is a need to better understand the different actors of the green transition
• For developing environmentally friendly solutions
• For targeting and communication

Why to use:

• Helps staff to create solutions
• Concretises the different needs and motivations of target groups
• Facilitates the planning of communication and services

How to document:

• Create written and visual descriptions of personas
• Save persona descriptions in a shared workspace, such as a digital project tool (e.g., Teams)
• Posters or presentations can be made to introduce personas

The roots of the method can be found here: The personas method is based on user-centred design (Cooper, 1999), where user groups are modelled based on needs and behaviours. The method is widely used, especially in service design (Stickdorn & Schneider, 2012) and software development, and it relates to user research and the creation of customer personas (Goodwin, 2009).