Workshop report - weADAPT

Climate Knowledge Brokers Workshop 2013
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Creating User Personas
As the workshop progressed, one very basic point kept surfacing: the need to improve our
understanding of our users and the landscape in which they are working. To help us home in
on this Mairi Dupar (CDKN) led a session to create some archetypal ‘user personas’.
User personas are personalised snapshots created to embody the characteristics and
attitudes of important target user groups. They can be fictitious or, probably better, based on
real people who the project team has met. The idea is that by giving them a name and
sketching them out in some detail, and perhaps even drawing a picture of them or pinning a
photograph of them on the office wall, it helps to bring real world users into focus, and allows
us to tailor our communications approaches better to meet their needs.
Creating a set of user personas works well as a team exercise in the early stages of planning
or refining a communication strategy. Here we approached it together, splitting into five
groups. Each was tasked with building up a persona for a different kind of user, drawing on
their combined experience. A snapshot of these five hybrid personas is shown below.
Nadine Smith
(Commonwealth
Secretariat)
introducing ‘Edgar’,
an ambitious Junior
Minister from Latin
America
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