The personas of users of European statistics, developed in March 2018 based on the user profiling exercise are only partially applicable to the context of NSIs due to a difference in target audience, scope of data, type of products available, and other factors.

Additional user research needed to be done to adapt these personas to the specific context of a specific NSI and to make them relevant and useful. Assumptions about the validity of each of the 5 personas and about potentially missing personas were first collected from internal stakeholders.

With those assumptions in mind, a short online survey was created to ask HCSO users about their goals and behaviour when it comes to using the HCSO website and products. Next, 10 follow-up phone interviews (5 in English and 5 in Hungarian) were conducted with users who participated in the survey. The goal here was to better understand why these users do not clearly identify or match with one of the Eurostat personas. 

The insights from this exercise were incorporated into the ESS usability guidelines for websites and products of statistical organisations and ESS guidelines on user analytics, user research and user personas in statistical organisations.

The 4 HCSO statistics user personas are provided below: