Proto-personas are a quick and inexpensive way to model customer needs, goals, and challenges for your digital product or web project, and help orient the team towards more empathetic thinking.
Proto-personas can be created relatively quickly. Above is an example. We use a basic template we created and modify the information based on the needs of the project.
You've probably heard of traditional personas, but what exactly is a proto-persona? Proto-personas are a modified version of personas that stimulate the same type of empathetic and user-oriented thinking, but with less investment in time. They can be created with the help of the cross-functional team, which makes them a quick and inclusive tool for turning on the user experience goggles. In essence, proto-personas are a persona hack that you create using whatever data you have available and with the help of the team.
Whereas a classic persona builds on firsthand user research, a proto-persona is based on whatever insights you have, which can include secondhand study or even the well-informed hunches of a team of people. (Of course, if you have firsthand research to refer to, that’s ideal.) Proto-personas are less scientific and rigorous than traditional personas, but they can be equally useful for helping a team shift into a more empathetic mindset about users' needs.
In “The User Experience Team of One - A Research and Design Survival Guide,” author Leah Buley says to use proto-personas when
We recommend creating a proto-persona template in Sketch, which you can customize to align with your company's or client's branding. Although the poster-sized model is great for in-person sessions, a formalized document to capture the team’s Proto-Personas is helpful for documentation purposes.
In summary, proto-personas are great tools that can be quickly created to get everyone on the same page and to help the team empathize with your users.
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