Concise Personas Based on Tacit Knowledge - How Representative Are They?

Personas have become integral to the user-centered design process, enabling designers to acquire empathy for the users, and guiding the design. Effective personas need to be representative of the user population. Persona creation based on immersive data collection and integrative analysis is recommended. In practice though, constraints of time, resources and access to end users often result in insufficient data. Augmenting the limited data with tacit knowledge can be effective in persona creation, although the representativeness of such personas must be established. We created concise personas through two action research inspired cycles leveraging tacit knowledge of a cross-functional, multidisciplinary team designing a service for their own organization. The representativeness of these personas was statistically validated using paired comparison method and Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. The approach can be valuable in similar situations for creating valid personas.