When it comes to personas,
your first job is to humanize them.
And can you think of five real world examples?
Are they anchored in things you've observed or can go out and observe?
And your second job is to focus and
operationalize them in your particular area of interest.
One great tool to do this is THINK, SEE, FEEL, DO.
What about those those things in your particular area of interest?
And I will use Helen or could Hank the HR manager
from the Enable Quiz example he kind of talk about this.
Think is the rational point of view that your persona has about your area of interest.
In the case of Enable Quiz,
the big job is bringing in technical talent and the job that Enable Quiz is
interested in doing is kind of one subjob of that which is screening technical talent.
And what might Helen think about this area.
We would ask her a question like "tell me
the top five hardest things about bringing in good technical talent."
We might ask her "Tell me about how are
things now versus how would you like them ideally to be",
because we really want to get at the tension if it exists between that because
if there isn't such tension then
the opportunity for a product is a little bit questionable.
Helen might think that there is tension because now we just
don't spend enough time on recruiting and we all agree that we should.
So, there's a dissonance there,
and that is something if they in fact hear that without
leading them to sort of say that meaning if Enable Quiz
leads the subject who represents Helen the HR manager to a general question
about how are things now with
recruiting or even just screening candidates versus how would they ideally be,
then they know that that's good.
She may say, "We really just don't get enough specifics about
the job descriptions and then
the candidates end up not understanding what the job is about,
and there are surprises when there shouldn't be down the road. "
Those are all things that we might hear and observe in this THINK.
Then we have SEE.
And this is whatever the persona thinks,
how did they get that perspective?
What things do they read?
What people do they talk to?
What events do they observe that leads them to think what they think?
And so this could be really different in Helen's area,
it might be talking to her peers,
or just reading about what is going on in HR tech companies,
or just observing what goes on at the company.
FEEL, feel if you're new to this,
is probably the weirdest one,
but this is if we want our user or a customer to do something important,
we need to understand the emotional resonance of this particular activity,
and the way to get to this for instance with the subject is not to ask and "Hey,
tell me about your feelings" that would be too weird.
The way to ask them is to talk about a specific example like, "Hey,
tell me about the last open position that you filled,
tell me about the things that happened with the candidates."
We get this example, we talk about it we detail it,
and then maybe you can ask,
"What was that like, how did you feel?"
That's the kind of one example of how you might get
actual data back on this to create a good persona.
And then finally, DO.
This encompasses a couple of things.
One, it just encompasses the basics of what our persona does in this area,
how many open positions is Helen or Hank fill every
year for the company that Enable Quiz is going to sell this thing to?
How many candidates do they normally interview for each of those jobs?
We want to get at that stuff to sort of understand the sort of
boundaries and the size of the activity that we're going to address.
And then along with this is all the things that she
actually or he actually does to screen the candidate,
move them through the recruiting process.
This is, I realize,
a very brief introduction to persona. It's a really important area.
If you're interested, there are some written tutorials and
other references in the resources section
that you can check out if you want more depth on this.