Personas

Making personas inclusive

Unfortunately, different disabilities and impairments are often under-represented in the end results; despite being a powerful tool to highlight how someone with different needs may use the product or service.

Some ways to make personas inclusive:

• Include at least one persona that is focused predominantly on accessibility issues.
  
  The Gov.uk’s accessibility personas and Rosenfeld’s personas for accessible UX are both comprehensive resources
• Weave situational, temporary and cognitive impairments through several of your personas.
  Try replacing lifestyle attributes (for example, your persona’s choice of newspaper or a hobby) with less obvious needs. This might include temporary impairments such as injuries, situational limitations such as bright sunlight or noise, mental health conditions such as anxiety, or cognitive difficulties such as dyslexia. A useful tool to help with this is
• Use Gov.uk’s login persona profiles as a team to experience the web with different disabilities and impairments.
  
  These login profiles simulate the user’s condition and the tools they may use online. These can help inform the set of personas.

Personas are particularly useful during the strategising, design, content creation and evaluation phases of a project. Introducing accessibility issues in personas at this early stage helps to keep them front-of-mind throughout the project lifecycle.