text: One very hands-on tip: if you don’t have enough time to go out and do proper research and develop personas in the real research setting: get frontline staff in a room together! People who are in direct contact with your customers – be it on the shop floor, be it in sales, whoever is direct touch with a diversity of customers. Let them create personas!
  Let’s get maybe 20 people in a room, split them up in subgroups of two or three people and let them create five to ten personas per group.
  It will just take an hour or two and you will end up with something like 200 personas. Then you let them present their personas in the meantime you observe the room. You will see that some of the other folks will start nodding, or laughing, or pointing towards that, saying “I know exactly what you’re talking about!”. By that you actually already triangulate your research.
  You already see: Does this persona resonate with more people? Then it’s probably existing out there, at least elements of it. Or is it actually an edge case that maybe doesn’t resonate with so many people? Then you can use the group to cluster them – and probably, within one day or less, you come up with quite robust personas. They are not really based on research, but based on the experience of people who have a really good knowledge about your customers.
  One element I already mentioned in the beginning, that is the the saying “Design for the average, test with extremes”. Think about your core personas, but also think about a wider set of personas covering the edge cases. If you only focus on the one persona, there’s always a risk that you leave something out.
  Think about diversity when you create your personas. Diversity in all their fragrances that we have, because often the people who design personas are rather homogeneous. For example a research team: maybe the similar age, similar education, even same gender, same skin color and so on.
  But your customers are not like this. Diversity is one of the keys to the great power that personas can bring to your organization. To actually think about diversity, have a representative of different customers in the room.
  So you need to start with someone. Make a decision. Start with one persona and design towards this persona. Take the average user for that, the average of one particular segment, one of your core personas. Once you have a prototype for that, don’t go through the entire design process, until you launch and only test it then. As soon as you have a prototype, start testing it with the edge cases and you will learn a lot about that. You will iterate your prototype.
  Depending on the feedback of that, prototyping can be done by imaginative prototyping. Put this persona into the room, hang it up and think about “How is it for this persona?”. It’s much more powerful if you actually invite representatives of this persona, some real people. Prototype with them and see how they react. The personas are a great guideline for you to select the folks you invite for prototyping. Make sure to invite a diverse group, at least for the core differentiator between your personas.
  
  Mobile ethnography started in B2C research, however B2B companies are now beginning to see the benefits of this approach and have started adopting the technique.
  The guest author of this article is Jen Birch of TechJMedia, a mobile tech enthusiast, looking for brilliant ways to leverage smartphones and tablets to uplift the modern day living. She has attended a couple of tech events in 2015 and 2016 in Europe. She hopes to build a machine learning app development company someday.