Personas: Your Imaginary Friends
For creating human-centered design you need to understand humans, no matter what extra-terrestrial creature you are. When all the interviews are in the past, you have a whole scope of notebooks, stick-its and audio recordings… But what should you do with all this trash… treasure?
Well, obviously, all people interviewed are slightly different from each other and have a bit different views on the product. And, of course, you want your product satisfy them all. But do you really have time to look through all these volumes of information in a development process?
Apparently, not. Probably, if you’ve ever tried it, you have realized that traditional market segmentation doesn’t give expected results, while quantitative methods, like Frankensteins, model non-existent monsters.
When enough information has been gathered, you have to distinguish the behavioral patterns and key characteristics that represent a whole, using affinity diagrams, KJ techniques or similar.
Similar features of the user you can combine in order to create user archetypes further.
A persona is a character-driven element that helps you remember who you are building the application for. It’s a fictional character that is a personification of your real users. To create a persona you should be asking questions like:
- What’s your favorite product? Why is it better than other similar products?
- What product frustrates you most? Why? How would you improve it?
- If you could create a perfect application to help you with the task, what features would it include? How would it look like?
Answers to these questions may give you some insights of how&why people use definite products. It’s possible that you’ll learn new ways how to improve the user experience in your own application.
The number of the personas in one project should be limited to 3–5 not to lose focus on the main design goals and not to let user range become to wide.
Justin Smith recommends adding details, so that you can understand the user’s mindset, desires and tasks they usually perform. Your website or application will have two audiences: the core audience (your product will not do without) and the fringe audience (everyone else).
Definitely, if you’re lack of time, you should focus on your core audience. But the best is to pay attention to both.
We solve this problem by applying a concept of model. Models are widely used in the natural and social sciences to represent a complex phenomena with a healthy proportion of abstraction. Therefore, we can use research to create descriptive models of our users. And believe, it’s a uniquely powerful tool for interaction design.
Personas are not real people, but they’re based on real people behaviors and are used to represent them in design process. We use them to develop an understanding of our users’ goals in specific contexts, to inform and justify our designs.
Art of Creating People out of Thin Air
You may think that if you want to satisfy the needs of a diverse audience, you have to broad the functionality. But the practice says it’s a lie.
The reason for that lies in the fact that features, included to impress and satisfy Jack, may be useless and distracting for John.
It may seem like finding an average user. But personas don’t seek to establish an average user, but rather to express exemplary or definitive behaviors within these identified ranges. That is why it’s not enough to search for three stock photos of attractive people and describe some Jack-Sparrow-like characters under them.
Designers must identify a persona set associated with any given product. Multiple personas carve up ranges of behavior into discrete clusters. Different personas represent different correlated behavior patterns.
All humans have motivations that drive our behaviors: some are quite obvious, some are subtle. But our personas should have these motivations written down as goals. Understanding why a user performs a certain task gives a designer great power to improve or even eliminate the tasks yet still accomplish the goals.
So, when creating a persona, make sure you:
- give the persona a real name, so that the persona feels real. Name can also be labeled by behavioral segment;
- identify the job, role and company;
- include vivid details. While age, gender, and device usage are important, you also want to describe psychology. Know your users: what are their fears and aspirations? You can use metrics tools for demographics and psychographics. Hobbies and interests also fit here;
- tell about intelligence. Tell shortly about your users’ knowledge in technology, domain sphere (if there’s any) or experience;
- add some background information. As persona is a social being like any other human, it’s choices can be influenced by some social factors (as parental support, or reputation, or leadership);
- speak out the motto. Include a quote that characterizes persona’s personality through it’s own words.
Usually, persona’s description fits a page or even less. Photos are often taken from stock, to avoid any coincidences with real people. Sometimes these descriptions can include some sketches to tell a story or illustrate key real life aspects, behavior or goal connected to the current design issues. Some pictures or sketches of typical locations, objects or acts based on persona’s lifestyle may be included.
Personas are useful in the further process, too. They serve as a reference to the target audience special features. They can be used in presentations, discussions and conceptualization.
But what should you do if you don’t have any chance to make the research but already understand the use of personas?
Quizas… Quizas… Quizas!
Although it is highly desirable that personas be based upon data, sometimes research cannot be performed due to various factors (from trivial lack of time to Martians’ attack or something similar). In these cases, provisional personas or “ad hoc” personas, as Don Norman calls them, may help. These provisional personas are based on our assumptions about who the important users are and what they need.
In lean UX, personas creation process is reversed and designers first create proto-personas (who are actually very similar to above-mentioned provisional personas). Proto-personas are about best guesses as to who is using our product and why, that then may be validated by research or may not.
What is important here is to avoid stereotypes, focus on behaviors, motivations, not demographics.It’s better to represent them with sketches, not photos to underline their provisional characters.
The main thing is that personas can prove vitally important in situations where you have distance between you and the user. So, in this cases, it’s better to have an imaginary friend than to have none.
A persona is a highly reflective instrument that helps you consider all aspects of a user. When persona is rooted in the information you’ve collected from the users, it can have a very tangible effect. Yet designers’ empathy gives opportunity to dive deep into any personas’s psyche and imagine what motivates them. And time you spend articulating their frustrations and what makes them happy cannot go unnoticed for the design process.
References:
- Alan Cooper. About Face
- Travis Lowdermilk. User-Centered Design
- William Lidwell. Universal Methods of Design
- Chris Bank, Jerry Cao. UXPin. Web UI Design. Best Practices
- Jeff Gothelf, Josh Seiden. Lean UX
