UX Diary #3 — Persona

7 min readMay 27, 2019

Hello again! The UX Diary keeps going and today we will dive deep into the Persona. If you didn’t read the previous posts yet, you can click here to read Customer Journey Map post or you can click here to start from beginning.

A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choises, etc.

It’s a common mistake to wait until the personas are finalized before beginning the socialization process. Socialization attempts within an organization without buy-in are often met with resistance.

Getting all of the stake holders involved early in the process involves them in informing the initial understanding of the customer and therefore, helps define the research. Informing these stakeholders of the projects progress will keep them interested, provide opportunities for feedback, ensure a higher quality persona deliverable and generate greater buy in through out the organization.

Demographics are temptingly easy to collect ftrom various sources in an organization but persona work yields a much deeper understranding of how customers do the thing they do and what they expect from an organization within any given context.

This knowledge about customers’ motivations (the how) makes it possible to create innovative solutions, products, ad campaigns and customer support (the what) that cater to customers on a personal level.

Personas can and should be shared and utilized across the entire organization and within various product development, marketing, customer support and sales departments. Each department can use this persona information; for example, product managers can use the information to design a product better meets the needs or desires of a particular persona, and marketing can use them the craft messaging that resonates.

Tasks

The What

What are the tasks your users are trying to perform?

This question can be applied in a general sense or be more spesific to a project. When developing personas, the question we need to answer here is “Are there different tasks for different personas?”

Defining personas can help to uncover new use cases. “Are the tasks you designing for matching up with the user base your personas represent?”

Diving deeper, we need to uncover how users are getting to that task in the first place. Is that we’re designing from the beginning, middle or end of their task path? Different personas may end up taking different paths.

What devices are your personas likely to use? Are they expecting a cross-platform to use? You’ve probably heard the expression “meet the users where they are!” Personas will help figure out where they are. An obvious example is that mobile usage is probably going to be very high with users in their 20’s while the usage is very low with the elderly. However, personas may point out other details which drive user expectaitons.

The How

We mentioned the mindset of our users coming into a task because it determines whether or not users are just exploring or trying to find spesific content. Are users coming in to see if you have that one item they are looking for? Do they just trust your site to serve up interesting content to them? This will heavily inform the information architecture and interaction design elements. It may need to direct users to where you want them to go. It also could be very open to allowing the user to dive down various, divergent paths. It all depends on the users.

Mental Models

Mental Models are what thoughts people form around an idea or activity and these vary from person to person.

For an example, let’s look at two mental models for taking a note. A 20 year olds mental model of taking notes may involve using a mobile app which is very different from an elderly person’s mental model of using a post-it note.

Mental models are incredibly important in UX because they illustrate how your user approaches a particular problem. If that’s not shaping your designs then you’re creating a bad experience for your user.

These mental models unveil the expectations of users. This can then guide what interaction patterns you’re using. If a user base has specialized knowledge that informs their decisions you should know this. Including it as part of the persona keeps details at the forefront during design. It helps even after design to double if your flow and interactions would make sense within the mental model of users.

Optimism vs. Cynicism

One thing to look at for personas is the level of optimism/cynicism in your users. One shows that it looks like or the user when everything goes right. The other can help shad light on what happens when something goes wrong. That can be caused by user error, system error as well as user delinquency..

Optimism

Optimism is what happens in the best case scenario. This is when the user does everything you want them to do. The user just wants to complete their task and, hopefully, your system is designed well enough to allow them to do that stress-free.

Cynicism

Cynicism is the user you don’t want to deal with or think about. However, this is the user that’s going to make your system better. It helps you figure out what could go wrong and how the design for it when it does.

Case Study

Most of UX Designers agreed with that the persona research process costs a lot and some of that UX Designers -one of my sources- says the persona research needs 80.000$-120.000$. But, everyone knows that this is not doable for every company, especially for startups. I will share my notes about the creating persona process for one of my clients, a social media startup — Vook App. Vook App continuing its journey as a London-based technology solutions company now, but we will look into 2016’s Vook App.

Vook App was a live stream based social media platform, at 2016. The development process began before Periscope and Meerkat published, so Vook was an unique idea at the beginning of its journey. While Vook developers creating the platform Meerkat published first and then Periscope joined the market. Because of these, Vook developed itself with new features. Developers added the group-video chat and mutual-live stream features and made the idea unique again.

I joined Vook App’s journey as a digital marketing consultant at March, 2016 and Vook App team wanted to publish the app at April, 2016. Marketing budget was pretty limited to achieve the goals. So, we didn’t have the budget for UX research and I had 3 weeks to create whole marketing strategy and b the UX part of the app. This was my challenge.

What We Did

The Problem

Low budget for marketing
No budget for UX research
Uncertain marketing knowledge because of new market

The Solution

We decided to work with influencers to make our budget more effective to reach new users. After that part, we needed a new scenario to make social media user subscribe to Vook App. The low budget was limiting the user reach frequency, so we decided to use more human-power. The solution was one-to-one communication with potential users in an organic way. We ran a social media for one week with create curiosity purpose. I communicated one-to-one with 3000+ people via Instagram DM. Yes, 3000+ people and just me.

The main strategic idea was simple: “We can’t ask the all UX research questions to users. So, we need to ask single-complete-question.”

We ran the campaign with a Y generation based general target auidience for one week with the motto “New social media coming!” But, we never ever said what’s it include. Is it like Instagram? Is it a community-based social media platform? Or is it the way to meet with the love of my life? Nobody knew it.

So, they asked. Users always wants to know what’s happening and they asked “What’s Vook?” This question was the beginning of one-to-one communication. We replied them via Instagram DM with a question.

What would you like it to be?

The Answers

“Dating Platform”: That was not what Vook’s aiming.
“Social Media Platform with Turkish Origin”: That was the part of Vook but team never wanted to use the word ‘local’ because of their global vision.
“Something with videos”: Bingo! Let’s add this user to our list.
“Digital TV”: That’s not wrong. Let’s add this user to our list as a viewer-user.
“Live Stream?”: What an awareness! This guy must be one of our early adopters.