With all of that new found knowledge in hand, It is time to turn all of the data you collected into persona or a group of personas based on the needs of the user. This is honestly were all of those evenings spent with your friends playing Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) and creating your character sheet for your player will finally pay off.
In the example shown above you can see there are a number of attributes at play. The data displayed here such as the tech savvy, social networks, etc; should have been gathering during the research phase of your project. Personas can often come off as cold and calculated. This is one of the reasons you supply a photo to the person. We are still addressing her needs and pain points, but now the persona has a face and a personality behind it.
I like to provide a bit of a back story to the persona as well. I believe that it makes this person more relatable, like you might actually know someone who could honestly be seen as Karen Lominack.
As the project progresses your personas can and may evolve overtime. If you have a number of previous personas built there might be a persona you can bring out of retirement and reuse for the purposes of your project. Just keep in mind that the personas will help give you a totem to remind you exactly who you are building your products for. This not only has implications in user experience, but also in the business realm. Business owners want to ensure that they are meeting the needs of their satisfied customers as well as the UX Architect does.
