Our approach

We set out to solve this problems with three core beliefs in mind:

• We should leverage the best of each framework to build something modular, flexible, easy to use, and compounds in value over time.
• The context of the user insights should be easy to use across all the tools you use today in your workflow.
• Provides just enough context of the user problem or need that inspires meaningful innovation.

The building blocks

The framework is made up of 3 parts:

• Persona - the ‘workspace’ or way to organize a collection of experiences across roles that represents a core segment of your users.
• Role - A responsibility or function that someone plays in a particular situation, organization, society or relationship. A persona can be made up of one or many roles to create a multi-dimensional understanding of your users.
• Story - Each story represents an observable insight that describes the context of the situation, what the user is trying to do, and the goal they are striving to achieve. The three parts of the story are compacted into one narrative that can be easily shared. Additionally, each story can be assigned an emoji that’s mapped to an emotion on a scale from positive to negative. Assigning emojis to each story is a way to map how the users feel or empathy mapping.

Learn from making

Long gone are the days where teams can afford to conduct discovery research, form personas, create journey maps, and empathy maps before designing and developing new features.  Teams are expected to move fast, iterate quickly and form the journeys and personas as they learn from making.

If you’re a design, product, or research lead working in a fast paced work environment, Personify is tailor made for you. Start with a problem, write the first story, for the first role, to create the first persona. Over time as you learn more about your users, add new stories that begin to chart the entire lifecycle of your user’s journey. You can build journey maps, empathy maps, stories, and personas all from one framework to create a living, evolving understanding of your users.

Designers can use the Figma widget to link link stories, personas, and roles into the context of their design work in Figma and Figjam. Linked content always remains up to date with the content in Personify. You can also embed content into other white-boarding tools such as Miro, Mural, and Whimsical by copying and pasting smart links directly into the canvas.