A focus on persona development is a key aspect of service design.
What is persona development?
The process of using user research to create detailed representations of the users of a particular service or solution.
The purpose of personas is to help design teams better understand the needs, behaviours, and goals of the target audience (the users of the specific product, solution, or service).
Knowledge
- Understanding of user research.
- Knowledge of best practice persona design
Skills
Able to:
- Think strategically: Consider persona development in the context of the target outcome(s) of the transformation.
- Analyse data: To understand who is using the solution or service today and / or who will use it in the future and to understand user needs.
- Map and define users: To understand the diversity of the user / customer base and to identify the target segments based on demographics, roles, preferences, or any other relevant criteria.
- Conduct user research: To inform the development of personas. This includes gathering insights into user needs, behaviours, preferences using a variety of methods and data sources.
- Develop persona profiles: Including information such as demographics, goals, and objectives (specific to a product or service), key challenges and pain points (based on the ‘as is’ service or solution), preferences in how they interact with solutions or services (e.g. channel preference, device preference), motivations and any other relevant background and context, validating them once complete.
- Personify personas: Make them easier to understand and refer to by giving them names and adding narrative.
- Collaborate and communicate: Share and explain the personas to members of the transformation team, and wider stakeholders as needed, ensuring that team members regularly refer to the personas to ensure service and solution designs take account of user needs.
- Iterate continually: As new information about user needs becomes available, update personas accordingly.
- Manage risk: Identity, assess and manage the risks associated with user research and persona development.
Behaviours
Behaviours associated with service design require team members to be:
- Collaborative
- Customer / user centric
- Curious
- Empathetic
- Analytical
- Creative
- Decisive
- Resilient
- Adaptable and pragmatic
- Open to feedback
- Committed to continual learning
Service design – maturity index
A related service design maturity index has been created to enable councils to understand their current maturity and to set, and work towards, a target state. This can be downloaded below.
