The document describes a new approach to creating personas that focuses on making them feel more human. It involves directly incorporating human verbatim quotes into personas, writing them from a first person perspective, and adding psychological profiles to capture personalities. The goal is to create personas that are tangible, go beyond just behaviors to core personality, and engage people while providing deep insights. The process includes observing customers, interviewing them, affinity mapping insights, and developing "human experiences" instead of just customer journeys. The end result is personas that are real, easy to understand, memorable, and feel like they can live and grow.

1. The Persona:
a Human
approach

2. A discovery…
Something struck me like the stench of BO
in the back of a taxi…
Personas have become clinical
artifacts, often product driven and don’t feel
human.
We needed a different approach…

3. *A new Human Persona
We needed a persona
 That is tangible – someone you can know, feel
who they are.
 That goes beyond behaviour, but to the core of
personality.
 That would engage people at a glance, while still
providing deep insight into who that person is.

4. * It starts with stalking
That’s right kids – it’s time to get to know our people.
Contextual Inquiry, customer interviews, direct
observation… listen and watch

5. * Keep it real
• We take all the things we heard and saw
• We write it all down on post its
• We affinity diagram it
… and what we have is some real life people forming
Human verbatims go directly into our personas
their words not our interpretation

6. * Keep it human
We use 1st person statements, their voice tells us who they
really are. More human, compelling, and authentic

7. * Add some psychology
Using psychological
principles such as the Big
5, we came up with a set of
scales that show us the
personality type of a human.
These are the innate traits
that a person has.

8. * And we have a human
Our human can now be
placed in any context, and act
according to their personality.
This allows us to take our
persona, remove the cohort
effect, and see what happens
to their behaviour (which can
be geared towards the service
we’re designing – in this case
Banking) in a different time,
place or environment.

9. * The Human Persona

10. * Put them in context
Yep – it’s time for some good ol’ fashioned customer journeys
…or is it?
Instead of just looking just at what a human might do, we
figure out what they
Touch, think & Feel
It’s not a customer journey as much as a
Human experience

11. * A Human experience

12. * The Human Persona
A human profile that is
Real
Easy to understand
Memorable
Lives, breathes and grows