Process
How to build research-backed personas in five steps
A five-step loop for building user personas from interview data instead of assumptions. It starts with candidate segments you try to disprove, recruits beyond your most engaged users, runs conversational interviews, clusters patterns instead of averaging them and ends with personas a team can use to make a call. Koji can run the interviews and group the themes by segment.
Where this appears
What's in this process
- Write down your hypothesis: Commit to 2 to 4 candidate segments before any interview, then try to prove them wrong.
- Recruit across the hypothesis: Aim for 15 to 25 interviews per segment, including low-engagement and lapsed users.
- Run conversational interviews: Cover goals, workflow, friction, workarounds and aspirations, in the user's own words.
- Cluster, don't average: Find the 2 to 4 distinct patterns of goals, frustrations and behaviour that recur.
- Make each persona decision-ready: Someone should be able to pick it up cold and use it to choose between two directions.
Use this image
Free to use in your docs, decks and posts under CC BY 4.0, as long as you credit Koji with a link to this page. To embed it, paste this into your page:
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<a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/research-backed-persona-process-five-steps"><img src="https://www.koji.so/visuals/research-backed-persona-process-five-steps/research-backed-persona-process-five-steps.png" alt="Process showing five steps to build research-backed personas, from writing a hypothesis and recruiting to interviewing, clustering and finishing them." width="1200" height="792" /></a>
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.koji.so/visuals/research-backed-persona-process-five-steps">How to build research-backed personas in five steps</a>, Koji</p>
