Personas are most meaningful when used in conjunction with ‘scenarios’. Scenarios are invented situations that imagine how the persona would interact with your material. Your scenario should include:
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a situation or event
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a context (eg the physical setting, the people involved, the emotions that might be experienced)
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the task or goal you want the person to achieve.
To draft new content using scenarios, think about who you are writing for and what they need to know in a particular situation:
Context: You are developing the Allergy information website for health professionals, which provides information on recommended treatments.
Persona: Kamal is a general practitioner working in a small country town. He has a busy practice with a wide range of patients.
Scenario: Kamal has an appointment with the parents of a young patient whose asthma is getting worse.
New content considerations:
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What are the top 3 treatment options that Kamal can talk to the parents about?
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What are the different considerations with these treatments (eg efficacy, cost, time)?
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Is there anything that would make a treatment unsuitable (eg age, other health conditions)?
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Does the rural setting make a difference to the advice (eg will travel be needed)?
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What other supports can Kamal suggest to the parents?
Scenarios are also very useful to test drafted content, to see if it is working in the way that you imagined.
To test existing or newly drafted content, set the scenario and follow it through by imagining what the persona would do at each stage of the process. Any difficulties you experience during the process tell you that the content may need to change, or you may need other solutions to help your users find what they need:
Context: You are developing the Carer support website, which provides information about services and support for unpaid carers.
Persona: Angela is an unpaid carer who looks after her mother, who has dementia. Angela is stressed and has little time to find information online, usually using her tablet to do so in spare moments in her kitchen.
Scenario: Angela wants to find out about resources in her local area that she can call on if she needs someone to look after her mother in an emergency.
What Angela will find on the Carer support website: The draft website has 2 sources for this information:
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A ‘Who to call’ box has clear information, but Angela might not see it because it is at the bottom of the page, and many users do not look there.
Action: Consider moving the box to the top of the page.
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A separate page on respite care has a lot of useful information but is quite dense.
Action: Consider rewriting to make sure key information is at the top, or develop a summary box to go in a side column.
Angela might also search for the information using the website’s search function. The relevant pages did not come up in a search for ‘emergency’ or ‘emergency care’. The pages only came up if she typed ‘respite’.
Action: Consider adding to the ‘best bets’ search function other terms that users might use (see Search tools for more information on best bets). User data on the preferred search terms would be useful here.
