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In this article, I'll introduce the functions and usage of the personas feature, which can be useful for anyone who likes to specify different user personas on a story map. 

Before I start to demonstrate the feature itself, let's talk a little about the workflow with personas:

First of all, you need to explain to your team what Personas are about and how they can make you improve your app. It is a very good idea that all of you sit down and write the Personas’ descriptions together, so everyone feels connected to them. Once you have them prepared, it is also good practice to print them and have them visible somewhere in the workspace to help you remember the final goal.

There is no standard way of describing personas. You can do it with a tabular approach in short sentences (more readable) or you can do it in a more descriptive approach (it gives more information). In the end, you will do it how you and your team feels more comfortable.

The normal process is to start with only three or four Personas and how they will work with the key features of your app. Once the development of that functionality is done you can create new Personas or imagine how the current ones will interact with the new features that are to come. It is very powerful to know your target audience after you’ve put into the production of your app or other product. That information can be used to make your Personas more realistic, so consider adding your marketing team to the “Personas Iteration” meetings.

In the next example, I will try to use gamer personas on the base of a story map about a puzzle game.  

First of all, let's create our first persona by opening the personas panel:

After we named our first persona, we can add an avatar picture to her by clicking on the empty picture frame:

At this point, we have a few options with the avatar picture:

Note: in case the board is exported to excel format, then imported back to StoriesOnBoard the "drawn avatars" will be restored, however, this method doesn't work with the other sources.

After the picture selection, a basic crop window will appear where we can resize the avatar picture.

If we are ready with defining the group and details of the persona, clicking on the "Add persona" button will save our changes. For the details, simple formatting help is also available on the panel.

After we saved our personas, there will be a few more options available, like edit persona details, edit the persona name. Here I will only describe the ones not so obvious, like the "hide personas on board" button which is for users who don't like to see the personas on their board all the time. Another not so obvious function is in the drop-down menu, next to the name of our persona and it is the "show related cards". This is working as a filter, like collapsing all the top-level cards not related to the selected persona.

Now it is time to add our personas to the activities/goals based on their needs. To add existing personas just hover the mouse over an activity (blue) card and click on the persona icon to open the menu.

In that menu, we can view the assigned personas on the persona panel, also create and assign a new persona, and switch between pictures and names.
In the lower part of the menu, we can assign or remove existing personas by clicking on their names.

When selecting a top-level card, a filter button will appear on the personas panel which allows us to see only the personas assigned to that card.

It is also possible to add personas not only to the top-level cards but to story cards as well. To do that just open a story card and choose "assign persona".

Cards with personas assigned will have an icon in their corner.

The global personas option is accessible from the story maps tab for users with admin roles.

With global personas, you can create personas for multiple story maps. Personas can be created the same way as in any story map and can be used o story maps within the workspace.

Global personas can be used the same way as personas created for each story map.

💡 Tip - Learn more about:

Global personas are only available in standard or higher plans.

For more information about personas please take a look at these articles: