Persona Scales

We use persona scales to analyze user goals, behaviors and attributes from user research.  The activity goes something like this:

• Identify goals, behaviors and attributes we learned about in our contextual inquiries (particularly where there are distinctions between users to whom we spoke).
• Place the above on a continuum with either end representing the extremes we learned about (not that exist but that we specifically learned about in our research).
• Place each user research participant on each continuum.
• Look for patterns where the people we talked to end up being grouped together often.  Circle the patterns -- each group in a different color works well.
• Each grouping identifies an archetype / persona.

We used three different scales, one for each role. Though roles won't always map to personas, in this case each role had such different goals we decided it was a good starting place that allowed us to simplify the data:

• Instructor Persona Scales
• Student Persona Scales
• Instructional Designer Persona Scales