Identifying personas using qualitative data

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Overview

WISE Cities is a platform for older adults to find access to opportunities, information, resources, and events in their local communities. Their focus is to assist older adults by combating social isolation and encouraging independent living. The platform is WCAG AA compliant, multilingual, and is planned to include AI-facilitated features, making it user friendly to a wide range of people.

Team

5 Product designers, CTO, & Co-founder

Methods

Interviews, surveys, & data sorting

Timeline

2.7 Months

Tools

Figma, AI, & Discord

Problem

WISE Cities and my team needed personas to tell us exactly what kind of people we were building our app for. WISE Cities had started developing personas, but there were too many of them for us to complete in a reasonable time frame.

Solution

My team and I would need to start over from scratch on the personas in order to complete them in a timely manner and alongside our other sprint projects.

Goals

How might we create distinct personas that reflect the diverse abilities, backgrounds, resources, and life experiences in our target audience.
How might we utilize personas to identify unmet user needs and guide the development of features that align with our target users’ motivations and behaviors.

KPIs

Identify a minimum of 2 representative participants per persona based on prior interview responses in order to develop 5 unique personas.
Categorize a minimum of 95% of feedback from each selected participant to effectively inform persona development.
Collect demographic survey responses from at least 40 adults aged 65+ (who represent a large majority of our users) to inform and support persona development.

This persona case study, part of my capstone project, helped identify the need for an interactive tutorial due to the existence of digitally challenged personas. Below is the link to the case study that covers the interactive tutorial.

Case study for digitally challenged older adults

Gathering data

Writing a survey

We used data from surveys, interviews, and focus groups to make the personas. We made our own online survey with google forms in order to gather relevant demographic data from 64 people.

Organizing data sets from interviews and focus groups

We analyzed data from past interviews and focus groups by WISE Cities and my team. In order to create five unique personas that portrayed participants stories, thoughts, and opinions.

Participants' data in the affinity maps was scatered and had to be reorganized. Responses from each participant needed to be grouped together.

Narrowing down the scope of the project

WISE Cities had nine unfinished personas, but since personas were not the main focus of our sprint, we narrowed the project scope for timely completion. Similar personas were combined, requiring a complete restart of the persona development.

Socialite

Busybody
+ Socialite

Homebody

Soloist
+ Homebody

Analogue

Analogue
+ Caree

Youngest

Caregiver
+ Youngest

Techie

Organizing the information to make personas

Break down the data

We organized the data further by putting the different comments from the people we selected into general categories. We were also able to use AI to detect themes in groups of post it notes for inspiration.

Persona: Analogue

Participants

Participant a1
Participant b7
Participant d4
Participant a3

Final personas

The final step was making personas that told a complete story of who these people were.

Click on images to enlarge them

Making a presentation

I created a presentation about the personas and presented it to WISE Cities, who later used the presentation to showcase their users to potential investors.

See slides in Figma

Summary

Key Lesson

Personas helped us connect with WISE Cities users and identify the need for a tutorial for older adults who were unfamiliar with technology.

🤔 Biggest Challenge

We handled a lot of information gathered for various purposes, but not all of it was relevant. A big part of our job was finding what information was truly relevant to the personas.