A precise understanding of the target audience is fundamental to designing useful products. Designs solve problems for users, identify with their needs, and have a real-time connection with their personalities.
Thus, standard practice in design requires that the designer or design team conducts extensive research on the personality of their user, and personifies the trends and patterns from their research to create a persona that will determine the focus of their design.
This is as opposed to designing products or services based on the preferences of the designer, which may cause problems in product usefulness since there is no data from research that indicates how the product can meet user needs. Before we go into the practical details of a user persona, it is important for us to define user persona.
What are User Personas?
User personas are fictional characters you create based on research to represent the people who may use your product. Personas help you understand your users' needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.
Creating personas can assist you in stepping outside of yourself. It will also help you recognize that different people have unique needs and expectations, as well as identify with the user for whom you are designing.
Personas simplify the design task, guide your ideation processes, and help you achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group. Personas bring a human element to what would the raw facts in your research. Personas are also referred to as model characters.
User personas are fictional characters you create based on research to represent the people who may use your product. Personas help you understand your users' needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals.
Types of User Personas
Role-based Personas
The role-based persona deals with the user's position within an organization. Designers must consider the role that users play in their organizations or in their lives.
Examining the roles that users play in real life can help inform better product design decisions. Where are we going to use the product? What does this role entail? What are the business objectives of this role? What functions does this role perform?
Engaging Personas
According to Lene Nielsen, "The engaging perspective is about using user stories' to evoke involvement and insight." Lene said, “It is possible to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people by understanding characters and stories.”
The engaging perspective's goal is to transition designers from viewing the user as a person with whom they are unable to identify and whose life they cannot imagine, to designers involving themselves in the lives of the personas.
The engaging personas make designers become more involved with their users. The goal is to use personas to create a vivid image of the user. The more people interact with the persona, the more they understand the purpose of the design. This type of persona creates stories that can bring the user to life.
Goal-based Personas
The goal-based persona focuses on what the average user wants to do with the product. A goal-directed persona investigates how users will use your product. This will come in after you have done user research to recognize the value your product has for the user.
Fictional Persona
The fictional persona is quite different from other types of personas. Unlike others, it is not a result of user research. It is the assumption of the design team about the user based on past interactions with that user group.
Designers can use this at the initial stages of the design to have an idea of the user expectations. Though it still requires solid data to prove the assumptions, else the design might lack the element of the current needs of the user.
How to Create a User Persona
The following details a step-by-step approach to creating user personas.
Research Information about Users
The first step to creating a user persona is to conduct user research to understand the user goals, mindset, behaviors, and aspirations. . It is important to gather as much information and knowledge about users as possible.
You can do this by interviewing and/or observing a large enough number of people who represent a target audience. The more a researcher observes and records during these interviews, the more realistic the persona.
In a case where it is impossible to carry out user research, the designer or design team can still define the persona based on previous interactions, this is different from creating a persona by assuming what the user needs, rather, it stems from the available data from previous user research of that user group.
Identify the Behavioral Patterns in your Research
The next step is to analyze the research results, the aim is to find similar patterns in the research and group similar people together into a single user category. Kim Goodwin suggested this three-step approach:
List all the differences in users’ behavior.
Map each user attributes against the differences you have listed.
Identify the trends (set of people having a particular attribute), these trends will form the basis of each persona.
Rank Personas in order of importance
In identifying behavioral patterns, you can discover that you have many personas from your research, this is because most products do not have many user groups, so designing many personas is safe.
Designing many personas can cause a lack of focus. Thus, it is important to set priorities in your user personas according to behavioral patterns in the research and how it connects with the general problem of the users.
Match Personas to real-life scenarios
Scenarios help designers understand the user needs, by matching the user personas with the scenarios, designers gather solutions and creative design solutions based on those requirements. Scenarios should be from the persona's point of view and should detail use cases that are likely to occur.
The first step to creating a user persona is to conduct user research to understand the user goals, mindset, behaviors, and aspirations. . It is important to gather as much information and knowledge about users as possible.
What should a User Persona include?
The following details are important when writing a user persona
Header: The Header is where you have the persona name, the persona photo, and a quote that defines the persona, for example, if you are designing an app for a car hire service: You can include a quote like: “Get me the best of cars, for a good journey experience.” The quote reminds you of what your user wants.
Demographics: While names and images can be fictional, demographic details are from research. This includes the age of the user, location, background, marital status, etc.
Goals and needs: The goals are from the needs of the user; The end goal is the motivation that inspires action and clarifies what users want or need to achieve by using your product.
Behaviors: This section details the behavior of the user, this helps you connect the user's needs and end goals to how they behave, so, you are not only able to create a product that meets their needs, but you can also create a product that synchronizes with their behaviors.
Importance of User Personas
User personas are important in the design process for the following reasons:
It helps designers identify with their users.
It helps designers focus on features in the design based on the most prevalent needs of the users.
It improves the designer’s insights in making the product usable and useful.
It explores the possible scenarios a user might undergo when using the product and helps the designer include features that address such.
User personas are important in the usability and usefulness of a product. They are a pictorial representation that confirms that the designer is user-centric in his design approach.
You can learn how to be more user-centric in your design by signing up for the GoCreate USA Bootcamp. Register for the Bootcamp here.