Personas Layering: a cost effective model for service design in medium-long term Telco research projects

Creating a set of Personas requires a considerable effort. Socio-psychological characteristic must be very punctually defined, needs and goals must also be well investigated and related to the service that will be designed. The accurate collection and processing of this large amount of qualitative and quantitative data represents often a huge cost. In our research area, which deals mainly with medium to long term telco projects, we developed a Personas layering model that allows us to adapt them over different contexts. The model consists in two main elements; the basic “Persona” and the “external” layer. In this paper we gave a practical application of our model within different projects developed in our research area. The benefits that arise from this model are the "durability" of Personas, their re-use in different contexts, the modularity of components and their possible recombination, thus reducing costs while maintaining excellent design insights.