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During family planning, you probably found that your company and your product team already think about your users as being in several categories. Before you begin processing the data you have collected, it is important to articulate these findings.
Categories of users are usually defined as sets of characteristics that groups of users share. The sets of characteristics you found are probably highly related to the business goals of your product. Identifying these categories now (even if they are based solely on assumptions) will help you structure your data processing and build a bridge between the ways your organization thinks about users today and the data-driven personas you will create.
If you found that your company or team does not currently think or talk about users at all, we believe you should try to define major categories of users before you begin processing your data. If you conducted your own user research as part of the family planning phase, you likely already defined user categories as you recruited participants.
You can articulate or define large categories of users by describing common user roles, user goals, or user segments that are important to your business and product. Note that identifying important categories of users does not mean identifying every possible way of grouping your users. In our experience, major categories of users tend to stand out (see the following G4K case study).
Even if they...
