In the Modeling phase, I analyze the data collected in the Research phase.

I identify the patterns in this data, and determine the trends that are particularly relevant to the current problem. I then model the users of your product, service, or system.

My most important model is a set of user personas. A persona is a fictional person that I create to represent a particular class of real users or system participants. A persona is an archetypal user, who resembles several people we interviewed, but does not exactly match any one of them. Personas embody the key trends that I distilled from my interviews, in terms of distinct sets of behavior patterns and goals.