Introducing GRACE: The behavioral & human-centered Persona Toolkit

Busara: Juhi Jain, Laura Schun

Glashaus Innovation: Charlotte Schumann, Aline Weinsheimer

SECTOR

FARM

PROJECT TYPE

Qualitative research

DOI

Location

Global

BEHAVIORAL THEME

Human-Centered Design

OVERVIEW

The GRACE Persona Toolkit, developed collaboratively by Busara and Glashaus Innovation, brings together behavioral science and human-centered design to help practitioners build personas that reflect how people actually live, make decisions, and respond to constraints. The toolkit provides a practical, step-by-step approach to developing, applying, validating, and continuously refining behaviorally grounded personas, particularly for work in food systems, agriculture, climate adaptation, and environmental sustainability in developing contexts.

Guiding Questions

How can we understand why people behave the way they do, rather than relying primarily on demographic characteristics?
What motivations, constraints, beliefs, social norms, and decision-making patterns shape users’ behavior?
How can behavioral science and human-centered design be combined to create more relevant interventions?
How can teams translate user insights into concrete design and behavior-change decisions?
How can personas remain useful as users, contexts, and interventions change over time?

The toolkit emphasizes that the starting point should be an open, user-focused research question, rather than a narrowly solution-driven question.

Method

Gather: Collect existing information, requirements, prior research, and team assumptions. Proto-personas can be used to make assumptions explicit.
Research: Engage with users through interviews, observations, focus groups, and other methods to understand their perspectives and behavior.
Assemble: Synthesize the data, identify behavioral patterns, create meaningful clusters, and develop persona profiles and prototypes.
Check: Test personas and the solutions informed by them with colleagues and target users, then validate and refine them.
Evolve: Continue learning from users and update personas as behaviors, contexts, and interventions change.

THEMATIC AREAS

Key Findings

Personas should go beyond demographics. The toolkit argues that useful personas should capture people’s needs, challenges, motivations, constraints, beliefs, and behaviors.
Behavioral context matters for intervention design. Social norms, risk perceptions, habits, emotional responses, trust, and limited information can influence how people adopt or reject new practices.
Personas should be grounded in evidence. Classical personas rely on qualitative research such as interviews, focus groups, and observations, while quantitative and secondary data can be used to validate and contextualize qualitative insights.
What people say and what they do may differ. The toolkit therefore recommends combining reported attitudes with observation and other behavioral evidence.
Persona development is iterative. Personas should be validated and updated when teams enter a new context, approach a new research question, or discover that the existing persona no longer represents users accurately.
Personas are intended to influence decisions, not simply describe users. They can be used to shape behavior-change objectives, prioritize features, map user journeys, generate ideas, and guide intervention design.
The toolkit is designed for practical use. It includes worksheets, checklists, templates, reflection questions, and the recurring example of “Christine” to demonstrate how a persona can be developed throughout the process.

Implications for Policy or Development

Start with people, not solutions. Teams should frame open questions about how users make decisions before deciding what intervention or product to build.
Build research into the design process. Personas should emerge from engagement with users and relevant evidence rather than assumptions alone.
Use personas across the project lifecycle. They can support early-stage planning, field research, intervention development, testing, implementation, and monitoring and evaluation.
Make personas actionable. Teams should connect each persona to specific behavior goals, friction points, user journeys, features, communication strategies, and intervention decisions.
Treat personas as living tools. The toolkit recommends establishing review cycles, assigning ownership, storing personas centrally, communicating them across teams, and updating them as contexts change.
Adapt to local contexts. The Christine example demonstrates how a persona developed in Kenya may need to be modified when applied in Tanzania, including changes to language, communication channels, digital platforms, and local behaviors.