What Are Personas?

Personas are fictional, yet realistic, character profiles created from research to represent groups of people who share similar behaviours, goals, and needs. They are one of the most widely used tools in human-centred design, and their primary purpose is to humanise those we design for. By grounding design decisions in lived experiences rather than abstract data, personas help us develop empathy and design initiatives that make sense within real contexts.

Most of us, in our organisations, make decisions about processes and initiatives that affect others. Yet, that “other” can often feel like an abstract entity, someone we may not know personally, or only understand through limited data. Depending on where we sit within our organisation, we might have greater or lesser proximity to the people we are designing for. How often do we engage in meaningful conversations with those we serve? How well do we understand the variety of situations they navigate?

Personas in StudentChangeLab

At StudentChangeLab, we have started to use personas to capture the diversity of experiences and characteristics among student representatives. There is no single archetype of a “student representative.” Personas allow us to humanise their experiences, deepen our empathy for their realities, and design support systems that respond to their distinct motivations and needs.

Personas are most powerful when they are evidence-based and story-driven. Including quotes, narratives, or paraphrased reflections that capture the voice of real participants adds depth and authenticity.

How We’re Building Them

Recently, we held a session with student representatives from a programme, to test some of our hypotheses about their experience. Through group discussions and direct observation, we identified two distinct profiles emerging from our insights:

• The entrepreneurial mindset – A student representative who is proactive and articulate, yet frustrated by the limited impact they feel they can make, as the implementation of their suggestions is perceived as dependent on staff acceptance of feedback and suggestions of changes.
• The place-maker – An international student who is new to the UK and to this academic system, still learning how to engage, connect, and find their voice within the representative role. They need an inclusive environment that is aware of people who prefer expressing themselves in written form in front of large audiences, and need clear structure to be effective.

These two personas, while sharing some common needs, differ significantly in confidence, cultural adaptation, and perceived agency. Treating “student reps” as a single homogeneous group would obscure these nuances and risk designing one-size-fits-all training and resources.

Below are the images of our emerging personas, which we continue to refine. They are simplified versions of personas, to make it easier to digest in this blog.

01. Ethan – the entrepreneur

Ethan is an international student with experience in volunteering and working outside university. He enjoys talking to people and is quite good at making conversations and is driven.

Needs to feel validated by the efforts already made.

“I have approached individuals for feedback and asked them to ask friends (..) We got criticism like ’30 responses are not enough (…) we got blamed for not having enough engagement with peers.”

Needs support to demonstrate achievements as a rep. 

“What am I going to say that I have done as a rep? That I have run surveys and collected feedback? That I attended meetings? So what? (..) In an interview you need to explain what you have achieved.”

“At the end of the day, you can have ideas but it’s up to them to do anything with them.”

02. Lee – Place maker (who needs to familiarise with the environment first.)

Lee is an international student. She comes from an educational system where one would ask less in public, and only in one-to-one situations. She has signed up as a rep, because she wants to get to know new people, but also to build CV and to do something meaningful.

Needs others to be aware of the language barrier.

“Language is a barrier to me. I get stressed when I can’t express myself as well as English speakers. I remain quiet. I have started challenging myself recently and decided to give my opinion in a seminar. I felt better afterwards, but very difficult for me.”

Needs support in collaborating with other peers. Being part of a group is very important.

“I really prefer to be with others. I don’t like to initiate things by myself. I even would choose a unit if my friends chose that course. So, if there isn’t enough energy in the reps group, I won’t do things just by myself.”

“Collaboration with other reps is difficult: I don’t know what we are doing or what we should do, we are waiting for guidance.”

“I don’t have contact with other reps often.”

It’s important to note that our personas are prototypes, not final products. They evolve as we gather new insights. Our starting point was a group session with eight representatives, but as we speak to more students, we expect to either expand the number of personas or add greater nuance to the existing ones.

How We Imagine the Personas Can Be Used

As mentioned earlier in the introduction, our goal is to build empathy for student representatives (their motivations, contexts, and needs) so that we can design meaningful and inclusive support. Staff members across the university (from the Students’ Union to programme directors and those facilitating Student Voice Meetings) could review the personas and assess whether they recognise these profiles or whether there is a need to adjust them.

Once they feel the profiles fit their own observations, those designing training – support , and holding SLLC or student voice meetings could potentially use these personas to reflect on questions such as:

• What kind of training or support would be most effective for this type of representative?
• Would approach meet the needs of all profiles, or should we tailor our support?

We have talked about personas as a tool to inform potential initiatives to respond to their needs. However, personas are also powerful tools for stress-testing ideas. When developing a new initiative, we can ask: How each of these profiles could react differently to this proposal?

We will recommend to any of our partners (the different programmes across schools), to test initiatives directly with those they intend to impact. However, before we test or pilot our initiatives, we can reduce risks of things not working, by trying to imagine how our personas (in this case, Lee or Ethan) would react to them. That’s what we mean with stress-testing ideas.

In that sense, personas enable us to simulate diverse perspectives, helping us reflect on potential implications and make adjustments before trialling new plans.

Traditional criticisms of personas and how it can be addressed at StudentChangeLab:

Traditionally, one of the main criticisms of personas has been that they are not authentic representations of the people we design for. It has been argued that a more genuine and human-centred approach is to design with people, rather than designing for an archetype who is not present in the room.

This is a valid and important critique. Personas should never be seen as a substitute for direct collaboration or partnership with real individuals. In our context, they are not intended to replace student partnership or collaboration with representatives. Rather, they act as a complementary tool. Our goal is to co-create experiences and systems with students, while using personas that authentically reflect experiences they can recognise and identify with.

However, in-person co-creation has practical limitations when there are time constrains. It is often impossible to have every perspective represented in a single session. The participants who are present, while essential, may only offer a partial view of the whole landscape. Personas help bridge this gap by capturing the diversity of experiences and perspectives that exist across the broader student body. In this way, they enable a more inclusive process, ensuring that decisions are informed not only by those in the room, but also by those whose voices might otherwise go unheard.

Another common criticism of personas is that, as their use has become more widespread in organisations, they have sometimes become instrumentalised, reduced to lists of characteristics (e.g. first in family, international students) or oversimplified bullet points. When this happens, personas lose their richness, empathy, and the storytelling power that makes them effective in the first place.

To remain true to their original purpose, personas should tell a story: a story seen through the eyes of the people we are designing with and for. A well-crafted persona evokes empathy because it represents a lived experience, not just a set of attributes. Memorable personas sometimes can be presented with realistic pictures of them, making it easier to recall. As we remember them, we can more easily automatically integrate their story in our day to day decisions: Who am I designing for, with this newsletter? Who am I excluding with this type of activity?

Finally, it is essential to recognise that personas are not static artifacts. Student cohorts, contexts, and priorities evolve over time. As such, personas must be regularly reviewed, and updated to reflect emerging realities and needs. When used dynamically and iteratively, personas remain a powerful tool for keeping human experience at the heart of our decisions.

In Summary

Personas, when thoughtfully crafted and used, keep us anchored in empathy. They remind us that design is not about abstract “users,” but about real people navigating complex experiences. In StudentChangeLab, we aim at defining personas as living representations of the voices we partner with, continually shaped by dialogue and discovery.

By Iria Lopez (Human-centred design specialist) 

Iria Lopez is a senior consultant, with +20 years of experience in human centered design.

For the past four years Iria has specialized in service design applied to HE, having done projects for Leeds University, Kings College London and most recently Manchester University.

You can read one of her points of view here.