Defining and prioritizing personas from a health customer's use cases
Key Takeaway
Choose one primary persona (two at most), then rank requests by their value to that persona and by technical difficulty.
A persona is a fictional archetype that stands for a group of real users who share behaviors, motivations, goals, pain points, or other traits. During discovery, you turn a customer's use cases into personas so design decisions stay grounded in real user needs. You then pick a primary persona to decide which work comes first.
What a persona captures
A persona blends many users rather than describing one real person, so the team can keep users at the center of design without tracking hundreds of individuals.
A persona goes beyond a job title or role because it captures how people work and the tools they use to get their jobs done. Salesforce bases its personas on the general tasks people do in their roles, not only what they do in the CRM, because different organizations may do the same task with different features, products, or even other systems.
A good persona sits in the middle: broad enough that you don't design for one person's individual needs, but specific enough that you don't end up with only a vague sense of who the users are.
Personas also show who you are not designing for. When a group of users does not use a feature, saying so explicitly removes that group from the design work and saves time.