GOAL: Your open project needs users and contributors, but how can you find them, get them involved, and keep them engaged and active in your community? This activity is designed to help you identify potential users and contributors, understand their goals and motivations, help them find a way into your project, and grow them into strong, committed community members.
FORMAT: Brainstorming, writing, and planning exercise.
TECHNOLOGY: A timer or stopwatch to time your freewrites. Pen and paper are here, over
TIME TO COMPLETE: about 45 minutes to 1 hour
About Personas: We’ll use tool called a “persona” which is commonly used in the design world, to help create products and experiences that really work for real world users (aka “user-centered design”). The persona is a totally imaginary person, but one who is based on real-world observations and understandings of actual potential or current users. We may (and almost always should) do some real-world user research in advance of developing our personas. But it’s important that the personas are imaginary, so we’re free to envision full user stories and motivations without needing to be factual.
We create the persona, imagine and define their motivations, skills, values, schedules, fears, haircuts, home addresses, likes and dislikes. The persona becomes real to the designer, and is used tool to test ideas and experiences (for example, a designer might ask “would our user persona, Rodrigo, who is an avid photographer and technophile but also an introvert who’s protective of his private information, like feature x of our social media platform?” ).
Usually more than one persona is used in the design process. Personas may be composites of several real-world users. The power of the persona is in its specificity; a good persona helps a designer (or project lead) put their own perspectives aside and empathize with the needs and motivations of the user.
1. Describe Your Community
Answer the following questions. It’s great if you have a whiteboard or big sheet of paper or sticky notes to do this. If you’re working through this exercise in a group where each person is anchored in a different community, you can pair up and interview each other about your communities. Be sure to capture your results! If you’re with team members who work with the same community, you can brainstorm answers together. If you’re working alone, that’s fine too— give yourself time to think freely and creatively—in all cases, write big and jot down whatever comes to mind. (brainstorming/writing together, 2 mins per question, 8 mins total)
- Who is in your community? How would you describe the range of people in your community? (answers here might be by interest, skill, role, affiliation, etc: for example: drone hobbyists, python developers, suburban parents, university alums)
- What kind of person do you most need in your community right now, in a year from now?
- Imagine: what does that person get excited about, and why? What might they find challenging or discouraging, and why?
- Who have you lost or are missing, and why do you think that person left the community?
2. Build Your Persona
Pick at least two members or potential members from the lists you collected above. Do the following exercise with each persona. (imagining, capturing, writing together, about 10 mins per persona).
- Create detail. give your persona a name, imagine where they live, the shoes they’re wearing, what they like and don’t like. This may seem superfluous, but the more real the persona feels to you, the more useful they’ll be.
- Define motivations and needs. What’s likely to get your persona engaged and excited? What are their personal goals? * Why might they be drawn to your project? What might be the value for them.
- Identify Skills. What skills or abilities does this persona bring? Could be technical skills, like Javascript or R, or could be “soft skills” like being a terrific communicator or storyteller, well-organized, reliable, etc.
- Consider challenges. What is difficult for your persona? What might be their stumbling blocks? What skills or resources are they missing that they”ll need to better engage with the project? What kinds of things might drive them away from your project?
- Write it up! Take the details and information you’ve provided above and write a short description, as per this example. If some of the goals and motivations you imagined don’t fit here, add them as a list on at the end.
Sample Persona Write-Up:
Rashid is a PhD student in astronomy at a university in Southern England. He’s outgoing and a snappy dresser, favoring skinny jeans and colorful cardigans. He lives in on-campus housing and after a long day at the lab he usually rushes home to see his wife and infant son. Rashid took an intro Java programming course long ago, as an undergrad, but his research now demands Python skills. He attended a two-day Software Carpentry workshop at his institution. He found the training valuable but has encountered difficulties in debugging and troubleshooting since the workshop, and is struggling on his own. Because of the competitive nature of his lab, he’s reluctant to ask colleagues for help. He follows Science Labs on Twitter, has some exposure to and interest to Open Science, but is hesitant to share his data for fear of being “scooped” on an important discovery. Motivators: publishing and tenure, excitement of learning new things; Skills: good interpersonal skills, charming, friendly; Challenges: limited time, may relocate to take a postdoc position in the next year.
- Add A Visual To really bring your persona to life, find an image that you can assign to them (google image search or stock photos work great).
3. Create A Pathway For Your Persona Consider how you’d like each of your personas to engage, and how you’d like them to level up or advance in your community. Think of the benefit to the project and community, but primarily benefit to the persona. A system of engagment levels currently in use at Mozilla looks like this:
Level 0 - No Action Level 1 - Solitary Action Level 2 - Directed Action Level 3 - Networked Actions Level 4 - Networked Leadership Level 5 - Sustained Leadership
For a given contributor, we might move them from level 0 to level 2, or level 3 to level 4? Our sample persona, Rashid, is probably at level 1-- solitary action. He's interested in open science, but working alone. How can we get him to Level 3 where he's begining to collaborate and work with others? How might he get to level 4, where he's beginning to teach or lead within his community?
When applied to a persona, the pathway is like a little story of the persona's history with the project.
An example pathway for Rashid, from level 1 to level 3 or 4 might be:
Rashid sees a flier advertising Python study group meeting up in his lab; he arranges with his wife to be home late that night and attends the meeting
At the meeting he’s greeted warmly; it’s an interdisciplinary crowd so he feels more at ease. The intro lessons are helpful, he makes a connection with another learner, a biologist, and he leaves feeling hopeful about learning python and makes some progress during the week
Rashid can’t arrange with his family to make the next meeting; the study group leader notices he’s absent and follows up, suggesting they meet for lunch, along with the biologist.
The lunch meeting turns into a “Hacky Lunch”… Rashid and the biologist end up debugging code then and there, and make plans to meet again the following week.
The study group leader asks Rashid to share/teach his debugging strategies at a Study Group meeting a few weeks away, so he’ll have time to plan for childcare in advance...
By using the persona and imagining this story, we can begin see what needs to be in place, anticipate struggles and problems, and find solutions. (brainstorming, writing and ordering pathway steps, 10 mins)
4. Move from Pathway to Concrete Tasks Use the pathway narrative to help define tasks or approaches you’ll need to take to bring this community member in or move them forward. For example, in the above story, Rashid learns about the Study Group via a flier… if we haven’t already thought of how we’re letting people know about our project, this little narrative has prompted us to think of a strategy. The story also helps us realize out that flexibility and alternate meeting times might be useful for some Study Group users, that leveraging personal connections can help bring people in, etc…
Review your pathway steps and make a list of things you could try in bringing users/contributors on. (brainstorming, writing, 5-10 mins).