Introduction

Crafting user personas is a key part of the UX design process; they offer a snapshot of the user research completed. By distilling the main goals and pain points from many surveyed users into one fictitious user, personas bring the human element into the design process. They help others to visualise the impact of the design, and you, as a designer, ensure your designs meet the needs discovered during the research phase.

Research and Planning

To craft my user personas, I relied on two sources of information: my surveys, discussed in a previous blog post, and the people I have met over the years across several neurodiverse support groups, charities and health services. From these interactions, I have heard many stories about issues and difficulties in the current autism diagnosis process, and these have encouraged me to tackle this process for my major project.

For this project, I needed to take all of this information, draw out the key points and use these to craft user personas to represent my target audience.

I decided to craft 3 main personas:

• A potentially autistic male in his early 20s, who has had mixed messages about his potential to be autistic and wants to find out for sure to improve his mental health and move forward in his life.
• A potentially autistic mother in her early 30s whose son has just been diagnosed with autism. This process has flagged similar traits in herself, and she now wants to confirm whether she, too, is autistic.
• A diagnostic specialist who has worked in a local health trust Adult Autism Team for 5 years and is exasperated that she and the whole team are working as hard as they possibly can, but making no impact on the ever-growing waiting list.

These 3 personas represent the views and opinions shared with me by a wide number of people over the years and represent, in my experience, those who will be the main users of my solution.

You can see more in-depth planning, where I mapped out my personas on my project Miro Board here: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVJ2nllB4=/?share_link_id=134072731152

I also looked at a couple of online articles to refresh my memory of how to put user personas together, https://qubstudio.com/blog/4-examples-of-ux-personas/, https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona/

Crafting the Personas

A key part of a user persona is that they are visual and can be placed within slide decks to present to stakeholders during a project, to bring everyone onboard and stay on track with the people that are being designed for.

An essential part is the image of each fictional user, as this is key to making these personas appear human. In the past, I have used stock imagery for this purpose, and while it does the job, it often doesn’t match the image you had for the persona. With the advance of AI image generators, I decided this time to use one of these for my pictures. I selected Google’s Nano Banana Pro, which I have seen online articles about, heralding its high-quality images.

I used basic prompts giving the ages and where the person in the image should be from, and was very happy with the images created. This took significantly less time than searching through stock imagery looking for a suitable image.

Now that I had the images, I just needed to give each of my personas a name. I also used AI for this, simply requesting that they give me a name for the person in each image.