Using Personas to Simulate Different User Types in User Testing

How to test different personas in a conversation design? How to preset variables before testing a conversational flow?

Creating different personas is a crucial step in any field of product design and helps with understanding and validating user needs, behaviours and goals.

Conversational design is no different; personas define expectations, concerns and motivation that different users may have, and a well-designed assistant should adapt its logic to satisfy user needs. Learn more about what personas are here and why they are important here. 

An example of a persona for a new budgeting startup

One of the unique features of Voiceflow is the ability to use dynamic variables in your conversation design to represent values such as your user's age, the final cost of an online shopping order, and support ticket descriptions. These variables can change throughout the conversation and direct its logic depending on the user persona and actions. If you want to read about leveraging variables in your conversational assistants, start from here. 

Creating a Persona

1). Click on run assistant button 

2). Next to 'Run Test', click on dropdown button and create a new persona 

3).You can adjust the variable states of the assistant variables for each persona to accordingly tailor their experience when interacting with the chatbot. 

Sharing a Prototype with a Persona

1). Ensure that your prototype has one or more personas already configured after testing your assistant. When you open the Share menu on the top right, look for the Variable state toggle and choose the persona that you want to share the prototype with. 

Note: You only have one prototype link, so all active instances of the prototype will have a persona attached with it.