ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how a grassroots bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organization in Seattle, Washington, used personas as a tool to make the latest bicycle transportation research intuitively usable by their 3,600-person volunteer membership. Seattle Neighborhood Greenways is a grassroots volunteer organization created to advocate for the majority of the overall population who want safe, healthy streets that are comfortable for biking and walking for people of all ages and abilities. The chapter illustrates how one persona—Wendy, the "Willing but Wary Cyclist"—was used to help crowdsource the data necessary to create a new connected network of low-stress routes in Seattle that will be usable by people of all ages and abilities. Personas are tools that are commonly used by private sector commercial product design teams as a way to make large volumes of user-experience research intuitively usable by large teams of product engineers and designers who do not have research backgrounds.
