{"id":13491,"date":"2016-03-28T21:03:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T05:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uxpin.com\/studio\/?p=13491"},"modified":"2026-03-09T19:55:50","modified_gmt":"2026-03-10T02:55:50","slug":"5-approaches-to-creating-lightweight-personas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.uxpin.com\/studio\/blog\/5-approaches-to-creating-lightweight-personas\/","title":{"rendered":"5 Approaches To Creating Lightweight Personas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSo who are we designing for?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

That should be the first question of every single project.<\/span><\/p>\n

It should be followed by, \u201cWhat are their motivations?\u201d or \u201cWhat are their goals?\u201d If you don\u2019t know who you\u2019re designing for, wireframing is a waste of time. I was once at fault: I would start projects without doing user research because I never thought there was time. After a few failed projects and wasted hours, I started every new project with at least some research so I could understand the target audience.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is always time. Understanding your audience is essential to building great products.<\/span><\/p>\n

One cost-effective approach of modeling your audience is personas.\u00a0<\/span>Personas<\/span><\/a> are user models derived from data to solve design questions. <\/span>They are not new<\/span> (my apologies to <\/span>Alan Cooper<\/span>), but are a derivative of\u00a0<\/span>market research<\/span><\/a> with origins in the 1920\u2019s. Personas are valuable, but are biased because they are based on assumptions and data selected by error-prone humans.<\/span><\/p>\n

Well constructed personas work because they are a starting point to define the users the product owners should identify with. They narrow the design focus and generate questions like \u201cHow would much value would this persona have for this product?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Even at the beginning of the project, you can construct <\/span>provisional personas<\/span><\/a> because having something is better than having nothing.<\/span><\/p>\n

If you need help with persona templates, <\/span>UX Booth<\/span><\/a> has a really good guide. <\/span>Super User Friendly<\/span><\/a>\u2019s is super cool. <\/span>Usability.gov<\/span><\/a> also has a great list of suggestions on how to create personas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pitch the client or your boss on spending some time performing customer visits. Once you have your personas built out, most smart product owners will understand their value and will want to put more time into understanding their users.<\/span><\/p>\n

Even without \u00a0access to your users, you can still build lightweight personas. Here\u2019s a few approaches.<\/span><\/p>\n

1. Ask the client<\/b><\/h2>\n

A friend of mine recently designed a website for a wine maker. The initial assumption was that there would be a certain market segment of end customers that the wine maker would want to sell to.<\/span><\/p>\n

The answer from client surprised him: the wine maker wanted to market to retailers that would be interested in carrying the wine in their stores, not to customers that would buy the wine online. While that significantly narrowed the audience, it dramatically changed to website approach.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"italian-vintage-old-beautiful-large\"<\/p>\n

With the client\u2019s help, he was able to develop content and branding that had a laser focus on the audience. <\/span><\/p>\n

Some clients have a pretty good idea of who they want as their customers, and you can tailor your personas that way. Understanding what they want out of the site or the application is a good starting point. It also helps you understand your client\u2019s needs, and you may able to educate them about personas they should be considering.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, most clients can\u2019t answer this question clearly (or the answer is \u201ceveryone\u201d).<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Use Wikipedia<\/b><\/h2>\n

One project I worked on was the Municipality of Anchorage website.<\/span><\/p>\n

There was a budget for doing user research, but flying a team of consultants to Alaska from Los Angeles was an expensive proposition. We had to build provisional personas before the first customer visit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"snow-landscape-mountains-nature-large\"<\/p>\n

We used Wikipedia and other websites that contained data about the city. The government workers provided research performed by another firm about website needs. While it\u2019s not perfect, most Wikipedia pages contain enough data that you can infer a lot about a place without visiting. In addition to the research, we validated our assumptions with stakeholders and by talking to residents informally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Things about Anchorage that would surprise you:<\/span><\/p>\n