Co-creating Personas

Step-by-step guide

1. ‍Plan and prepare Determine who you’ll invite as workshop participants and prepare your invitations. Describe the aim of the workshop, set expectations for your workshop, and think of an incentive for participating in the workshop if appropriate. Prepare the room (or any other venue you choose for your workshop) and write a list so that you don’t forget any essential material (templates, sticky notes, pens, research data, etc.). Write a facilitation agenda and establish facilitation guidelines to create a safe space through warm-ups and so on.
2. Welcome and split into smaller groups Start your workshop with a welcome, describing the workshop’s aim and agenda, and facilitate an introduction of all the participants. After a warm-up, split the participants into subgroups of 2–3 people. Introduce the concept of personas, explain the templates, and give them clear instructions on how to work with these. 
3. Create initial personas Have each group create 3–5 personas of their most common customers. Additionally, they can create some extreme customer personas (their most stressful customer, their dream customer). The facilitator should check that all teams have a common focus and are following the same instructions.
4. Present and cluster Have each group present their personas and stick them on a wall. Cluster similar personas together right away. You’ll realize when the group recognizes familiar customers from their laughter, nodding, and smiling. Ask the group to elaborate on such personas and try to find out which details actually made them recognize the underlying customers each particular persona represents.
5. Discuss and merge Give the participants some time to reflect, rearrange, and cluster. Let the group choose the most common personas. These are typically the biggest persona clusters on the wall or the personas where most participants laughed or nodded. Ask the participants if the chosen personas represent the diversity of gender, age, and other quantitative factors you know about your customers. If not, modify some of the personas to match these factors. The final distribution does not need to be representative, but if elderly female customers are a significant part of your business, it would be a mistake to only have young male personas. Create new personas for the main clusters based on the merged data.
6. Visualize and validate Enrich the personas with facts derived from research data or by sharing with other stakeholders. Visualize and finalize your personas. This step can be done after the workshop or in another workshop with different participants.
7. Iterate Run the workshop several times with different participants. Watch for patterns and maybe invite participants back for a final workshop to merge all the personas into your final set.
8. Follow-up Go through your notes and check different positions taken by your workshop participants. Index the generated data and highlight important passages. If needed, process your journey map into a format that is easier to comprehend (physical or digital). Write a short workshop summary that includes your key findings as well as the journey map and raw data you collected during the workshop from your participants, such as quotes, photos, or videos. 

Method notes

• ‍Consider repeating the workshop with different participants to identify patterns between different participants or different workshop settings.
• Sometimes it is useful to schedule follow-up interviews with some or all of the participants to understand their perspective and ask follow-up questions. Look for rather quiet participants, who might prefer to talk with you in a one-on-one situation instead of a workshop situation.