Personas turn your respondents into a handful of distinct groups you can picture and talk to. Each persona is built from real completed respondents who answered your study's key question in a similar way. You get one card per persona, a table comparing them, and the option to chat with any of them in your study's conversation.
In This Article
- Before You Begin
- How Personas Are Made
- Reading a Persona
- Comparing Personas
- Chatting with Personas
- When Personas Can't Be Built
Before You Begin
Personas are an optional feature that's turned on per account, and it's off by default. If your report has no persona section, that's almost always why—nothing has gone wrong with your study. To have personas turned on, contact your aytm account team. [CONFIRM: who clients should contact, and whether personas are a paid add-on]
- Personas are built when your report is written. Turning the feature on doesn't add them to reports that already exist; they appear the next time a report is built.
- Turning the feature off doesn't remove personas from reports that already have them.
- Your study needs enough completed responses—at least 200 in total, and at least 30 in each persona.
How Personas Are Made
You don't set anything up. When Skipper writes your report, it picks the focus—the question your decision turns on, such as purchase intent for a launch decision—and groups your respondents by how they answered it. If it can't pick a focus with confidence, it asks you.
The persona section opens with a setup card that shows what the set is built on:
- Grouped by—the focus, with the question numbers it comes from.
- Objective—the study objective the personas serve.
Personas are built in the background after the report is published, so the rest of the report is readable straight away. While they're being built, the setup card reads We are preparing personas for you with a percentage. When they're ready, the cards appear under it and Skipper posts The personas are ready. in the chat.
You'll get between two and seven personas, depending on how many distinct groups your data supports. The set follows your report's focus—you can't ask for a different number of personas or a different grouping on its own. If your report is rebuilt on a different focus or on refreshed data, the personas are rebuilt with it.
Reading a Persona
Each persona card shows, from top to bottom:
- A portrait and a first name.
- The persona's archetype—a short label for the group.
- How many people it's based on, and their share of everyone analyzed.
- A one-sentence summary, followed by up to four key traits.
- A Key Insight.
Click a persona card to expand its Cluster description.
💡 Tip: Names and portraits are there to make each group easy to hold in your head. The portrait reflects the group's makeup where the data shows a clear majority; otherwise it's illustrative. Everything else on the card comes from what that group actually answered.
Comparing Personas
After the persona cards comes a comparison card. Collapsed, it shows the personas' faces, how many are compared, and how many questions and answers the comparison covers. Click it to open the table.
The table has one column per persona, plus an All column for everyone analyzed. Rows start with Demographics, then Questions. Only rows where at least one persona is significantly different appear, so the table shows what actually sets the groups apart.
Cell colour compares each persona with all the others: one colour for Above All, another for Below All, and grey for Not statistically different. Letters in a cell mark which other personas it differs from.
To have Skipper walk you through the differences, right-click the comparison card and choose Chat about this comparison.
Chatting with Personas
You can put questions to a persona directly, as if it were a respondent from that group.
- Click Chat with me on a persona card. The persona joins your study's chat and introduces itself.
- Ask your question in the chat as usual. The persona answers.
- To bring in more personas, click Add to roundtable on their cards. With two or more in the chat, type @ and a persona's name to address just that one.
- To go back to Skipper, mention @skipper or select Skipper in the row of names above the message box. Click the × on a persona's name to ask it to leave.
📸 [SCREENGRAB: The chat with two personas seated, showing the roster of names above the message box]
A persona answers only from its own group's survey answers, including what that group wrote in open-ended questions. If your survey didn't ask about something, the persona says so rather than making it up.
Colleagues who can view your study can chat with your personas too. They do it in their own chat, which you don't see.
When Personas Can't Be Built
| What you'll see | What it means |
|---|---|
| No persona section in the report | Personas aren't turned on for your account, or Skipper couldn't settle on a focus for this report. |
| "Persona generation could not finish right now." with Try again | A temporary problem. Click Try again in the chat. |
| "Persona generation could not be completed." | A retry won't help. Contact support if you need personas for this study. |
| A message that the focus doesn't support a defensible persona set | Your data doesn't split into groups that are reliably different—too few responses, or a focus question everyone answered alike. The rest of your report is unaffected. |