Persona, Personified
What Is A Persona?
Persona is a representation of a user type that will use your application that includes the characteristics of the user. In developing user-oriented applications, Persona should be one if not the first priority to focus on. The content inside the persona may be fictional, but it represents how your application will be used in the real world, by real people. This means when making a persona, we should conduct research on the real target audience data, so we can form a behavioral pattern on the archetypical users’ goal and characteristics while using the application. Making personas is important to help the developer team focus on the usability of their application so it could create not only a good user interface, but also a good user experience for the intended audience.
Identifying Stakeholders For Personas:
Personas are also important to get to know your stakeholders. A success and failure of the project depends on managing the stakeholders by understanding their personas and mapping their abilities to influence project outcomes. External stakeholders are personas who will be outside the project but are affected by the project’s output, in this case: the customers that will be our users. Customers are the key stakeholders for any project, analyzing their wants and needs could prevent us from building the wrong product. Meanwhile, internal stakeholders are personas at different levels within the project, for example sponsors and employees. Just like the customers, employees are as important. Your project can achieve great results on the business side of things by engaging your employees towards the project objectives, as they affect management decisions.
Different Perspectives of Personas:
- Goal-directed Personas
This persona focuses on what the typical user wants with the product. The objective is to examine the process and the workflow that the user prefers to utilize in order to reach their goal on using our application.
- Role-based Personas
This perspective focuses on the user’s role in the organization while using our application. Instead of fully focusing on the goal, it also focuses on user’s behavior. My group project relies on this role-based personas to distinguish three roles that are: admin, lecturer, and student.
- Engaging Personas
The engaging perspective fully embraces the user and delves in the emotion of the user from their psychology, background, and what makes them relevant. This type of persona is so detailed with information, that the team could understand their potential user better and urge them to create the best product possible for the user.
- Fictional Personas
Fictional persona is created on assumptions based upon past experience of the design team with users. It can be deeply flawed as it doesn’t result from a deep research such as the other personas.
Making a Persona:
The first and most crucial step on making a persona, as previously stated, is to collect information about the target audience. While it is recommended to interview a group of people with different personalities, it can be conducted via surveys or web analytics. But if you don’t have the time to conduct those and want to work on the application as soon as possible, you can make assumptions that are based. The data to collect are the users’ motivations, expectations, difficulties, tasks, and goals. Once the data collection and segmentation are done, we can harmonize the data by exploring patterns of behaviors, so we can determine each of the user archetypes.
Personas might look and be different, but here are the parts that must be included because of its importance:
- Photo
A user photo for the persona must be semi-professional and non-fictional, even when the user itself is fictional.
- Name
Same with the user photo, even fictional, the name that is set in the Persona must make sense and align with the person in the photo.
- Description
To understand the user better, we have to include the description of the user themselves. A description displays a story of the user that motivates them to use our app. It could also act as a user’s simple biography and their daily habits. The description is based on the sample data we gathered, so it’s better to avoid unnecessary information.
- Goals
This is the user’s main purpose(s) that the user wants to reach by using the app. Defining a goal is important because it allows us to see how the user’s goal aligns with us.
- Problems
This is the user’s frustrations when using the app. It can originate from technical difficulties or the user behavior themselves. Defining a problem is important as defining a goal.
Other additional details such as demographic, experience, skills, social media can be seen as elective to the persona as it doesn’t have such impact as the previously stated parts.
After all of the important parts of the persona are designed, we can then have a better image on our potential user: from their backgrounds, purpose, and also struggles. But one persona is not enough, as one persona only represents one type of user. The more, the better. It is suggested to have 3–5 personas, so it can include a variety of user types and completely represent the user groups we have decided.
When designing the app, we have to carefully consider each of the persona user types every time we make a decision on design changes. The personas lead the team’s direction in the design process by reminding them which expectations, difficulties, behaviors, and goals the user has. By having personas, we could recognize that every user has different wants and needs.
References:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
