Traditional personas have a bad reputation - here is a better way to build a persona using behavior insights

Image taken from my framework on Miro

A traditional persona usually has information like:

Age
Gender
Occupation

In my experience they also get built with no real data to back up the personas - and just yesterday, I saw something on my feed on having chatgtp build you the persona - so again... not very data-driven there ( I know some are very data-driven, but not all)

While this information may or may not be relevant, what I am looking for is the themes the people are saying and thinking.

What do I want to capture?

-Lacks the knowledge to complete a task
-Confused about the next steps
-Overwhelmed by the choices

Now you may say, Robert, but we already capture this information in our empathy maps.

And then my question to you is, what then? do you run a behavioral diagnosis to then know what to design for?

This is exactly what you should be doing, and how you should be building your personas.

Extract all those nuggets of behavior and then run them through to understand from an evidence base, what you can do and how you can design for those barriers or enablers or behavior.

In my simplified example here, you can see that for the two examples, we used behavior change techniques that have a higher rate of effectiveness.

This means I can remove the guesswork and have a more solid hypothesis on what we should design and test for because I know what the symptoms are.

This persona Miro board has just been uploaded to my frameworks list.

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