Alternative persona setups

Our personas have inspired other people to create their own version. Here are some of the those other versions.

HMRC’s Virtual Empathy Hub

HMRC’s Digital Inclusion and Accessibility Standards team created a version of these personas that move the assistive technologies and simulations into the website itself. That means you cannot install these anywhere and use them on other websites, but it makes it easier to share the general idea and go through the various exercises without needing any other tools.

They adjusted the exercises in various ways by putting them into a journey per persona and ask further questions about the experience and expectations.

They’ve also added a new persona, Helena, a user with dyscalculia.

DigitalService’s Chrome extension

Germany’s DigitalService GmbH des Bundes have created a Chrome extension that does some of what the GDS’s implementation does. Except it’s handily in one single browser extension. At the time of writing (April 2025) it is still quite incomplete and is missing more than half of the original features.

Their codebase is Open Source and they welcome contributions.