Week 3 · Adaptive Planning Program

13. Persona Development

30 min

By the end you'll be able to

Create evidence-based personas from qualitative and quantitative data
Avoid stereotyping while maintaining persona specificity
Use personas to guide intervention design decisions

Data points provide statistics, but they do not have personalities. In this lesson, we aggregate insights from our empathy maps to create User Personas, fictional characters that represent specific user segments.

We emphasize the creation of “evidence-based personas” rooted strictly in assessment data to avoid stereotyping, ensuring that your intervention is designed for real human needs rather than abstract averages.

Practice quiz

Question 1
What distinguishes an ‘evidence-based persona’ from a generic demographic profile in this lesson?
- It is rooted strictly in assessment data rather than assumption or stereotype.
- It includes a stock photo and a fictional name.
- It is approved by an Institutional Review Board.
- It uses national census averages instead of local data.
Question 2
According to the lesson, why are user personas useful when raw data already exist?
- Personas replace the need for further data collection.
- Personas are required by most public health funders.
- Personas give statistics a personality so designers can build for real human needs.
- Personas allow programs to skip the empathy mapping step.
Reflection 3
What is the key risk when developing personas, and how does the lesson recommend mitigating it?

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