DfT Guidance: Transport user personas: understanding different users and their needs

Transport User Personas

Users of transport have different needs, preferences and behaviour traits.

To capture this diversity, we have developed 12 different personas to reflect 9 groups of people – also known as segments.

These segments were developed from existing research that was validated and updated by a large-scale survey and ethnographic research in 2022. They break up the population into smaller clusters to define their individual traits when using transport.

Typically, each group is represented by 1 persona (a fictional character) that provides us with an illustration of the people that belong to that segment. But some are represented by 2 personas to display diversity.

The research covers the population aged 16 and over in England only.