Why are personas the way they are?: Identifying six persona creation strategies

User persona creation is a well-established technique in user-centred design. However, the persona creation process is not well understood. Addressing this gap, this study investigates how twenty-nine student designers created personas from a customer dataset. Six main persona creation strategies emerged: (1) data-oriented, (2) diversity, (3) imaginative, (4) sociability, (5) self-centric, and (6) mixed strategy. The most common was the mixed strategy that combined data-oriented and diversity strategies to create personas based on the presented data while representing demographically diverse user groups. Most commonly, the designers created four personas, and they aimed at symmetry and evenness by creating, for example, an even number of male and female personas. The results demonstrate that creator-provided reasonings can increase the transparency of the persona-creation process, which could support stakeholder acceptance of the personas.