A beginner’s guide to qualitative and quantitative research

The word “persona” has many meanings. Sometimes the term refers to a part that an actor plays, other times it can mean a famous person, or even a character in a fictional play or book. But in the field of UX, persona has its own special meaning.

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Before you get started with creating personas of your own, learn what they are and the process to create one. We'll even let you in on a great, little tip — how to use Chalkmark to refine and validate your personas.

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What is a persona?

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In the UX field, a persona is created using research and observations of your users, which is analyzed and then depicted in the form of a person’s profile. This individual is completely fictional, but is created based on the research you’ve conducted into your own users. It’s a form of segmentation, which Angus Jenkinson noted in his article “Beyond Segmentation” is a “better intellectual and practical tool for dealing with the interaction between the concept of the ‘individual’ and the concept of ‘group’”.

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Typical user personas include very specific information in order to paint an in-depth and memorable picture for the people using them (e.g., designers, marketers etc).

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The user personas you create don’t just represent a single individual either; they’ll actually represent a whole group. This allows you to condense your users into just a few segments, while giving you a much smaller set of groups to target.

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There are many benefits of using personas. Here are just a few:

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• You can understand your clients better by seeing their pain points, what they want, and what they need
 
• You can narrow your focus to a small number of groups that matter, rather than trying to design for everybody
 
• They’re useful for other teams too, from product management to design and marketing
 
• They can help you clarify your business or brand
 
• They can help you create a language for your brand
 
• You can market your products in a better, more targeted way

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How do I create a persona?

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There’s no right or wrong way to create a persona; the way you make them can depend on many things, such as your own internal resources, and the type of persona you want.

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The average persona that you’ve probably seen before in textbooks, online or in templates isn’t always the best kind to use (picture the common and overused types like ‘Busy Barry’). In fact, the way user personas are constructed is a highly debated topic in the UX industry.

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Creating good user personas

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Good user personas are meaningful descriptions — not just a list of demographics and a fake name that allows researchers to simply make assumptions.

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Indi Young, an independent consultant and founder of Adaptive Path, is an advocate of creating personas that aren’t just a list of demographics. In an article she penned on medium.com, Indi states: “To actually bring a description to life, to actually develop empathy, you need the deeper, underlying reasoning behind the preferences and statements-of-fact. You need the reasoning, reactions, and guiding principles.”

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One issue that can stem from traditional types of personas is they can be based on stereotypes, or even reinforce them. Things like gender, age, ethnicity, culture, and location can all play a part in doing this.

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In a study by Phil Turner and Susan Turner titled “Is stereotyping inevitable when designing with personas?” the authors noted: “Stereotyped user representations appear to constrain both design and use in many aspects of everyday life, and those who advocate universal design recognise that stereotyping is an obstacle to achieving design for all.”

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So it makes sense to scrap the stereotypes and, in many instances, irrelevant demographic data. Instead, include information that accurately describes the persona’s struggles, goals, thoughts and feelings — all bits of meaningful data.

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Creating user personas involves a lot of research and analyzing. Here are a few tips to get you started:

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1) Do your research

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When you’re creating personas for UX, it’s absolutely crucial you start with research; after all, you can’t just pull this information out of thin air by making assumptions! Ensure you use a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative research here in order to cast your net wide and get results that are really valuable. A great research method that falls into the realms of both qualitative and quantitative is user interviews.

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When you conduct your interviews, drill down into the types of behaviors, attitudes and goals your users have. It’s also important to mention that you can’t just examine what your users are saying to you — you need to tap into what they’re thinking and how they behave too.

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2) Analyze and organize your data into segments

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Once you’ve conducted your research, it’s time to analyze it. Look for trends in your results — can you see any similarities among your participants? Can you begin to group some of your participants together based on shared goals, attitudes and behaviors?

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After you have sorted your participants into groups, you can create your segments. These segments will become your draft personas. Try to limit the number of personas you create. Having too many can defeat the purpose of creating them in the first place.

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Don’t forget the little things! Give your personas a memorable title or name and maybe even assign an image or photo — it all helps to create a “real” person that your team can focus on and remember.

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3) Review and test

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After you’ve finalized your personas, it’s time to review them. Take another look at the responses you received from your initial user interviews and see if they match the personas you created. It’s also important you spend some time reviewing your finalized personas to see if any of them are too similar or overlap with one another. If they do, you might want to jump back a step and segment your data again.

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This is also a great time to test your personas. Conduct another set of user interviews and research to validate your personas.

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User persona templates and examples

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Creating your personas using data from your user interviews can be a fun task — but make sure you don’t go too crazy. Your personas need to be relevant, not overly complex and a true representation of your users.

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A great way to ensure your personas don’t get too out of hand is to use a template. There are many of these available online in a number of different formats and of varying quality.

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This example from UX Lady contains a number of helpful bits of information you should include, such as user experience goals, tech expertise and the types of devices used. The accompany article also provides a fair bit of guidance on how to fill in your templates too. While this template is good, skip the demographics portion and read Indi Young’s article and books for better quality persona creation.

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Using Chalkmark to refine personas

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Now it’s time to let you in on a little tip. Did you know Chalkmark can be used to refine and validate your personas?

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One of the trickiest parts of creating personas is actually figuring out which ones are a true representation of your users — so this usually means lots of testing and refining to ensure you’re on the right track. Fortunately, Chalkmark makes the refinement and validation part pretty easy.

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First, you need to have your personas finalized or at least drafted. Take your results from your persona software or template you filled in. Create a survey for each segment so that you can see if your participants’ perceptions of themselves matches each of your personas.

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Second, create your test. This is a pretty simple demo we made when we were testing our own personas a few years ago at Optimal Workshop. Keep in mind this was a while ago and not a true representation of our current personas — they’ve definitely changed over time! During this step, it’s also quite helpful to include some post-test questions to drill down into your participants’ profiles.

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After that, send these tests out to your identified segments (e.g., if you had a retail clothing store, some of your segments might be women of a certain age, and men of a certain age. Each segment would receive its own test). Our test involved three segments: “the aware”, “the informed”, and “the experienced” — again, this has changed over time and you’ll find your personas will change too.

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Finally, analyze the results. If you created separate tests for each segment, you will now have filtered data for each segment. This is the real meaty information you use to validate each persona. For example, our three persona tests all contained the questions: “What’s your experience with user research?” And “How much of your job description relates directly to user experience work?”

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bove, you’ll see the results for Persona #2. This tells us that 34% of respondents identified that their job involves a lot of UX work (75-100%, in fact). In addition, 31% of this segment considered themselves “Confident” with remote user research, while a further 9% and 6% of this segment said they were “Experienced” and “Expert”.

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These results all aligned with the persona we associated with that segment: “the informed”.

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When you’re running your own tests, you’ll analyze the data in a very similar way. If the results from each of your segments’ Chalkmark tests don’t match up with the personas you created, it’s likely you need to adjust your personas. However, if each segment’s results happen to match up with your personas (like our example above), consider them validated!

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For a bit more info on our very own Chalkmark persona test, check out this article.

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Further reading

   
• "From personas to user stories" - an article by Roman Pichler on how to discover the right stories and integrate them into a sprint.
   
• "Personas make users memorable for product team members" - Aurora Bedford looks at how personas support user-centered design throughout a project’s lifecycle.
   
• "Developing successful personas" - Luke Wroblewski presents notes from a talk by Tamara Adlin who outlines a set of practical ways to align stakeholder, developers, and designers to use personas.
   
• "Describing personas" - Indi Young looks at some of the problems in accurately describing personas.
 

Qualitative user research is about exploration. Exploration is about the journey, not only the destination (or outcome). Gaining information and insights about your users through interviews, usability testing, contextual, observations and diary entries. Using these qualitative research methods to not only answer your direct queries, but to uncover and unravel your users ‘why’.

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It can be important to use qualitative research to really dig deep, get to know your users and get inside their heads, and their reasons. Creating intuitive and engaging products that deliver the best user experience. 

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What is qualitative research? 🔎

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The term ‘qualitative’ refers to things that cannot be measured numerically and qualitative user research is no exception. Qualitative research is primarily an exploratory research method that is typically done early in the design process and is useful for uncovering insights into people’s thoughts, opinions, and motivations. It allows us to gain a deeper understanding of problems and provides answers to questions we didn’t know we needed to ask. 

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Qualitative research could be considered the ‘why’. Where quantitative user research uncovers the how or the what users want. Qualitative user research will uncover why they make decisions (and possibly much more).

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Priorities ⚡⚡⚡⚡

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When undertaking user research it is great to do a mix of quantitative and qualitative research. Which will round out the numbers with human driven insights.

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Quantitative user research methods, such as card sorting or tree testing, will answer the ‘what’ your users want, and provide data to support this. These insights are number driven and are based on testing direct interaction with your product. This is super valuable to report to stakeholders. Hard data is difficult to argue what changes need to be made to how your information architecture (IA) is ordered, sorted or designed. To find out more about the quantitative research options, take a read.

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Qualitative user research, on the other hand, may uncover a deeper understanding of ‘why’ your users want the IA ordered, sorted or designed a certain way.  The devil is in the detail afterall and great user insights are discoverable. 

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Priorities for your qualitative research needs to be less about the numbers, and more on discovering your users ‘why’. Observing, listening, questioning and looking at reasons for users decisions will provide valuable insights for product design and ultimately improve user experience.

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Usability Testing - this research method is used to evaluate how easy and intuitive a product is to use.  Observing, noting and watching the participant complete tasks without interference or questions can uncover a lot of insights that data alone can’t give. This method can be done in a couple of ways, moderated or unmoderated. While it can be quicker to do unmoderated and easier to arrange, the deep insights will come out of moderated testing. 

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Observational - with this qualitative research method your insights will be uncovered from observing and noting what the participant is doing, paying particular attention to their non-verbal communication. Where do they demonstrate frustration, or turn away from the task, or change their approach? Factual note taking, meaning there shouldn’t be any opinions attached to what is being observed, is important to keep the insights unbiased.

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Contextual - paying attention to the context in which the interview or testing is done is important. Is it hot, loud, cold or is the screen of their laptop covered in post-its that make it difficult to see? Or do they struggle with navigating using the laptop tracker? All of this noted, in a factual manner, without personal inferring or added opinion based observations can give a window into why the participant struggled or was frustrated at any point.

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These research methods can be done as purely observational research (you don’t interview or converse with your participant) and noting how they interact (more interested in the process than the outcome of their product interaction). Or, these qualitative research methods can be coupled with an

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Interview - a series of questions asked around a particular task or product. Careful note taking around what the participant says as well as noting any observations. This method should allow a conversation to flow. Whilst the interviewer should be prepared with a list of questions around their topic, remain flexible enough to dig deeper where there might be details or insights of interest. An interviewer that is comfortable in getting to know their participants unpicks reservations and allows a flow of conversation, and generates amazing insights.

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With an interview it can be of use to have a second person in the room to act as the note taker. This can free up the interviewer to engage with the participant and unpick the insights.

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Using a great note taking side kick, like our Reframer, can take the pain out of recording all these juicy and deep insights. Time-stamping, audio or video recordings and notes all stored in one place. Easily accessed by the team, reviewed, reports generated and stored for later.

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Let’s consider 🤔

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You’re creating a new app to support your gym and it’s website. You’re looking to generate personal training bookings, allow members to book classes or have updates and personalise communication for your members. But before investing in final development it needs to be tested. How do your users interact with it? Why would they want to? Does it behave in a way that improves the user experience? Or does it simply not deliver? But why?

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First off, using quantitative research like Chalkmark would show how the interface is working. Where are users clicking, where do they go after that. Is it simple to use? You now have direct data that supports your questions, or possibly suggests a change of design to support quicker task completion, or further engagement.

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While all of this is great data for the design, does it dig deep enough to really get an understanding of why your users are frustrated? Do they find what they need quickly? Or get completely lost? Finding out these insights and improving on them can make the most of your users’ experience.

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When quantitative research is coupled with robust qualitative research that prioritizes an in-depth understanding of what your users need, ultimately the app can make the most of your users’ experience.

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Using moderated usability testing for your gym app, observations can be made about how the participant interacts with the interface. Where do they struggle, get lost, or where do they complete a task quickly and simply. This type of research enhances the quantitative data and gives insight into where and why the app is or isn't performing.

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Then interviewing participants about why they make decisions on the app, how they use it and why they would use it. These focussed questions, with some free flow conversation will round out your research. Giving valuable insights that can be reviewed, analyzed and reported to the product team and key stakeholders. Focussing the outcome, and designing a product that delivers on not just what users need, but in-depth understand of why. 

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Wrap Up 🥙

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Quantitative and qualitative user research do work hand in hand, each offering a side to the same coin. Hard number driven data with quantitative user research will deliver the what needs to be addressed. With focussed quantitative research it is possible to really get a handle on why your users interact with your product in a certain way, and how. 

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The Optimal Workshop platform has all the tools, research methods and even the note taking tools you need to get started with your user research, now, not next week! See you soon.

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In the rapidly evolving landscape of User Experience Research (UXR), one challenge stands out consistently: effectively communicating the value of UXR to stakeholders across the organization. As our recent whitepaper "The Value of UXR in 2024" reveals, the success of UXR initiatives often hinges not just on the quality of the research itself, but on how well its insights are integrated into decision-making processes. Let's explore how stakeholder integration can be the key to unlocking the full potential of UXR.

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Identifying key stakeholders and their needs 🕵️

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The first step in effective stakeholder integration is identifying who your key stakeholders are and understanding their specific needs and priorities. These stakeholders might include:

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1. Executive leadership: Interested in high-level insights that tie directly to business goals and ROI.
2. Product managers: Looking for actionable insights to inform product roadmaps and feature prioritization.
3. Designers: Seeking detailed user feedback to inform design decisions.
4. Developers: Needing clear, implementable recommendations.
5. Marketing teams: Interested in user perceptions and preferences to inform messaging and positioning.

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As one UX leader in our study noted,

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"Understanding the unique perspectives and priorities of each stakeholder group is crucial for effectively communicating the value of UXR."

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Techniques for effective stakeholder engagement 🦄

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Once you've identified your key stakeholders, the next step is to engage them effectively throughout the research process. Some proven techniques include:

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1. Early involvement: Include stakeholders in the research planning phase to ensure alignment with business objectives.
2. Observational opportunities: Invite stakeholders to observe user research sessions firsthand, fostering empathy and understanding.
3. Regular check-ins: Schedule frequent touchpoints to share interim findings and gather feedback.
4. Collaborative analysis: Involve stakeholders in data analysis sessions to leverage their expertise and build buy-in.

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Our survey revealed that organizations with high levels of stakeholder engagement throughout the research process reported significantly higher perceived value of UXR.

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Tailoring UXR communications for different audiences 📣

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One size does not fit all when it comes to communicating UXR insights. As one research manager in our study observed,

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"When we started tailoring our research reports to different stakeholder groups, we saw a dramatic increase in the adoption of our insights."

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To maximize impact, it's crucial to tailor your communications to different audiences:

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For executives 👩💼

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When communicating with executives, it's crucial to get straight to the point and demonstrate the business value of UXR:

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• Highlight key findings that directly impact business goals (e.g., user retention, conversion rates, market share)
• Use executive summaries that can be quickly scanned (no more than one page)
• Create clear, impactful data visualizations (e.g., dashboards, infographics) that show trends and comparisons
• Provide concrete examples of how UXR insights have led to measurable business improvements
• Include ROI calculations where possible, showing the financial impact of UXR-driven decisions
• Use benchmarks and industry comparisons to contextualize findings
• Anticipate and address potential business implications and strategic questions

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For example, instead of detailing usability issues, present a graph showing how addressing these issues could potentially increase customer satisfaction scores by X% and reduce churn by Y%.

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For product teams 📦

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Product teams need comprehensive insights that can directly inform their decision-making:

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• Present detailed user personas and scenarios to bring user needs to life
• Use user journey maps to illustrate pain points and opportunities across the entire user experience
• Provide specific, prioritized feature recommendations based on user needs and preferences
• Include case studies of similar products or features to provide context and inspiration
• Present quantitative data on feature usage and user preferences
• Offer clear next steps and actionable items for the product roadmap
• Use interactive prototypes or mockups to illustrate potential solutions

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For instance, create a user journey map that highlights key pain points in the current product, then overlay recommended features or improvements at each stage of the journey.

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For design teams 🎨🖌️

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Designers need rich, detailed feedback on the visual and interactive aspects of the product:

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• Provide specific user feedback on colors, layouts, interactions, and other design elements
• Use heat maps and click maps to show how users interact with designs
• Include video clips of usability testing sessions to show real user reactions and behaviors
• Highlight powerful user quotes that capture emotional responses to designs
• Present before-and-after comparisons to illustrate the impact of design changes
• Use annotation tools to pinpoint specific areas of designs that need attention
• Organize feedback by design principle (e.g., consistency, accessibility, simplicity) to align with design thinking

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For example, create a gallery of video clips showing users struggling with a particular interface element, paired with quotes expressing their frustration and suggestions for improvement.

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For development teams 👾 👾 👾

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Developers need concrete, implementable insights:

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• Provide a prioritized list of usability issues, bugs, or areas for improvement
• Use technical specifications and measurements where relevant (e.g., load times, error rates)
• Include device and browser information for reported issues
• Utilize developer-friendly formats like issue trackers or ticketing systems
• Provide clear acceptance criteria for recommended changes
• Include code snippets or pseudocode to illustrate potential solutions where appropriate
• Use flow diagrams to illustrate complex user interactions or system behaviors
• Highlight any technical constraints or considerations uncovered during research

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For instance, create a prioritized list of usability issues in a format that can be directly imported into the development team's project management tool, complete with severity ratings, reproduction steps, and suggested solutions.

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By tailoring your communication in these ways, you ensure that each stakeholder group receives the information they need in a format that resonates with their priorities and workflow. This targeted approach increases the likelihood that your UXR insights will be understood, valued, and acted upon across the organization.

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Building long-term stakeholder relationships 🏗️

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Building long-term stakeholder relationships is crucial for effective UXR integration, and it's an ongoing process rather than a one-time effort. Successful strategies include consistent follow-up to track the impact of research insights, celebrating wins and positive outcomes resulting from UXR, providing continuous education through workshops and training sessions, and maintaining open feedback channels for stakeholders to share their thoughts on the research process and outputs. 

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Our whitepaper findings highlight that organizations fostering strong, long-term relationships between UX researchers and other stakeholders typically demonstrate higher levels of research maturity and seamless integration of UXR into product development processes. This underscores the importance of nurturing these relationships to maximize the value and impact of UX research within the organization. 

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By investing in these long-term connections, UX researchers can ensure their insights continue to drive meaningful change and innovation across the company.

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Stakeholder integration: the cornerstone of impactful UXR

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Stakeholder integration is not just a nice-to-have in UXR—it's a critical factor in demonstrating and maximizing the value of user research. By identifying key stakeholders, engaging them effectively, tailoring communications, and building long-term relationships, UX researchers can ensure that their insights drive meaningful impact across the organization. As we look to the future of UXR, the ability to effectively integrate stakeholders will become even more crucial in our increasingly complex and fast-paced business environment.

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Ready to transform your UXR practice and unlock its full potential? 

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Optimal Workshop's comprehensive platform is designed to support effective stakeholder integration at every step of the research process. From collaborative planning tools to customizable reporting features, our suite of UXR solutions helps you engage stakeholders, tailor communications, and build lasting relationships that drive innovation. 

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Don't let valuable insights go unnoticed or unused—take the first step towards maximizing your UXR impact today. Start your free trial with Optimal Workshop and discover how easy it can be to bridge the gap between user insights and business decision-making, positioning your organization at the forefront of user-centered innovation.