Personas
The Personas tab of a project's People pages: the archetypal users the project is built for, with their goals, frustrations, habits, proficiency and devices; adding, editing, archiving, restoring and deleting them.
By the end of this page you will have sketched who a project is built for, know every field a persona carries and what reads each one downstream, and know how a persona is put away, brought back and, when it must be, deleted.
A persona is an archetypal user: a named, sketched person with goals, frustrations and habits, so the analyst, the developers and the testers picture the same someone. Personas are the "as a …" of every user story and the actors of every use case; Heimdall reads them when it drafts stories and tests, and the test cases will be read against the devices and the proficiency you record here.
The Personas tab is the second of the project's People pages; the first is Stakeholders, who the project answers to.
Before you begin
| You want to | You need |
|---|---|
| Open the Personas tab | persona:view-any on the project. Every staff role has it; a client guest has it through their project membership. |
| Add a persona | persona:create, through your role on the project or your team role, or to own the team. Business analysts have it by default. |
| Edit, archive or restore one | persona:update. |
| Delete one | persona:delete. |
The page lives under a project: open the project, choose People in the sidebar and switch to Personas in the tab strip above the table.
Read the personas
The table lists one persona per row, in the project's order:
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Persona | An initials tile, the name and the tagline beneath it. Press the name to open the detail flyout. An archived persona carries an Archived badge. |
| Role | What they do, in their own world. |
| Tech Proficiency | How at ease they are with technology: low, medium or high, as a coloured badge. |
| Devices | The first three devices they use, and a count of the rest. |
| Updated | How long ago the record last changed. |
| Row menu | View Persona, Edit Persona, Archive Persona or Restore Persona, Activity, Delete Persona. |
Sort by persona, tech proficiency or updated by pressing a column heading; press it again to flip the direction. Above the table, narrow the list with the search box (words in the name, the tagline or the role title) and the Archived switch, which shows archived personas instead of live ones. The filters travel in the page address; Clear Filters on the empty state drops them all.
Add a persona
- Press New Persona.
- Type the Name: a memorable handle such as Busy Buyer, not a real person. It is unique within the project.
- Add the Role Title (what they do, in their own world) and a one-line Tagline.
- Write the Sketch: who they are under Demographics, what they want under Goals, what gets in their way under Frustrations, and how they work under Behaviours.
- Under Technology, rate their Tech Proficiency and list the Devices they use, separated by commas.
- Give them a Quote: something they would say about the product or their day.
- Press Create Persona.
The persona appears in the table at once and persona.created goes out to every endpoint
subscribed to it.
A name is all it needs to start
The sketch can grow as the analyst learns the users, and Heimdall can draft the whole sketch from the brief for review. The one rule is the name: stories and use cases will name personas, and two _Busy Buyer_s would make the backlog ambiguous.
Open a persona
Press a persona's name, or View Persona in its row menu, to open the detail flyout: the initials tile, the proficiency badge, the name, role title and tagline, the quote set apart, the Devices as tags, each part of the sketch that was written, and the created and updated stamps. From the flyout, Edit, Archive or Restore, Activity and Delete are one press away.
A link such as /projects/<project>/people/personas?show=<id> opens the tab with that persona's
flyout already open; notifications and Heimdall's buttons use it.
Edit a persona
- Press Edit Persona in the row menu, or Edit in the flyout.
- Change what you need. A new name must be free within the project.
- Press Save Changes.
Every change travels as persona.updated with its old and new values, the devices as a list. An
edit that changes nothing announces nothing.
Archive, restore and delete
- Archive Persona takes the persona out of the default view. The stories and use cases that will name it keep resolving; switch on Archived above the table to find it.
- Restore Persona brings an archived persona back into the default view.
- Delete Persona removes the persona with its sketch and its activity history after a confirmation; there is no undo. Stories and use cases that will name personas are not here yet; once they are, a persona they name will be archived rather than deleted.
All the fields
What happens next
- Every add, edit, archive, restore and delete is written to the persona's activity history with who did it and where from.
- The
persona.created,persona.updated,persona.archived,persona.restoredandpersona.deletedevents go out to every endpoint subscribed to them. - Stories, use cases and test cases will name personas as those modules land, which is why a persona in use is archived rather than deleted.
Heimdall on this page
Heimdall reads the personas through the same tools the MCP server offers and carries the open project as its context.
Sketching personas is a person's work, with Heimdall drafting for review: an agent over MCP reads the record and never writes to it.
From the API and MCP
Personas API
List, get, create, change, archive, restore and delete personas over REST.
list_personas and get_persona
The two MCP tools that read a project's personas as the token sees them.
Permissions
| Action | Permission |
|---|---|
| See the personas | persona:view-any, a client guest included |
| Open a persona | persona:view |
| Add a persona | persona:create, or owning the team |
| Edit, archive or restore | persona:update, through a project role or a team role |
| Delete a persona | persona:delete |
| Read or restore its versions | persona:view to read, persona:update to restore; never a client guest |
Frequently asked
Related
- Stakeholders — who the project answers to
- The project overview — the project the personas belong to
- Status reference — the three-step scale
- Revisions and versions — every save kept, any version put back
persona.*webhook events
How is this guide?
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Stakeholders
The Stakeholders tab of a project's People pages: the client's sponsor, product owner and approvers, Zuse's own leads and third parties, each with a side, a role, a weight and the approvals that name them; adding, editing and removing them, and what a guest sees.
Glossary
The Glossary tab of a project's Dictionary pages: the words the project agrees on, with definitions, other names, related terms and a review status.