Representation of a Person’s Cognition
There it is, i made the joke
So, aside from Persona the video game, Persona also exists as a term in application design. Let’s say you want to make an website that caters to a certain people of interest. That’s a vague view point right? “A certain people of interest” is not a concrete measurement to make your website as user-friendly as possible. Persona exists to simulate people that will use the website you’re currently making.
Persona is a user representation in a form of a fictional individual that contains summary of expectation, goals, characteristics, tasks, environment, and potential threats of a real user. Persona is developed by Alan Cooper in 1980s. So, the idea is to make an imaginary character that has real traits of a real human being using what you’re creating. With this approach, developers can specifically design their applications to their respective clients. When creating user persona, one must analyze and categorize the intended user data first and adapt it to the application design.
Fundamentals of Persona
These are universally agreed points of fundamentals inside a persona:
- Motivation : Reasons for user to reach their goals.
- Attitude : User behavior that explains the user characteristics.
- Comfort Level : The measurement of how comfortable a user to use an information technology.
Purposes of Persona
In general, Personas are made as a point of reliable reference to facilitate developers. Verbosely, Personas can benefit software development in various ways. These are interface design error than can be prevented with Personas:
- Edge Cases : Unused features that has been developed.
- Self-Referential Design : Simulate real user perspective in designing product.
- Elastic User : The obscurity of product requirement due to minimum knowledge of user needs.
In the other hand, Personas can also benefit different roles in developing software such as:
- Designer : Point of reference to design the “look and feel” of the software interface.
- Project Leader : Evaluate to adapt new ideas to fit into the design.
- Information Architect : Starting point to design interface behavior, wireframe, and labeling UI.
- Copy Writer : Write the exact content to the exact user.
- System Engineer : Considers the best approach that coincides with the user behavior.
Steps to create a Persona
- Gather data : Researching the data as a foundation of the Persona. Can be done by Individual Interview, Contextual Interview, Focus Group, Survey, or Usability Testing.
- Create hypothesis : Creating hypothesis based on the data gathered.
- Explain the Persona : Once the hypothesis is accepted by the team, make the Persona that represents the specific group of users mentioned in the hypothesis.
- Set up scenarios : Create situations and solutions for the Persona.
- Distribute the Persona : Distribute the persona to the development team members that don’t participate in the creation of the Persona. This can make those members evaluate their decision in developing based on the Persona.
Persona in actuality
In my Software Programming Project course, my team created a Persona for a fintech company. Since i maintained the backend, I don’t participate that much in creating the persona. In pre-development cycle, the Persona was created with our Product Owner. The application itself is called Account Officer Productivity Monitoring System
The main user of our application is called an Account Officer, he/she is a person that manages to acquire and manage small businesses like small shops to become agent for the company.
Our Persona is called Budi. Budi is an Account Officer that isn’t a tech savvy person and can’t use technology very well. He gets works from the company to acquire and manage agents under their care. But, the work mechanism feels complicated because the medium of receiving works from the company is through whatsapp messaging app and to store works to the company through huge load of paperwork. He also struggles in knowing the location of agents and see the results of his work neatly. He hope there’s a solution that makes things easier for his work.
The Persona that we made really facilitate us to make decisions for designing the UI of our application. For example, above is the homepage of the app. Since the purpose of Budi opening the app is for make his job easier, so we made a 4 menu UI in the homepage that all are Budi’s work as an Account Officer. In doing so, Budi can access the main features of his work easier.
We designed a easy to approach UI for Budi since he is not very good at technology. We significantly increased the font size and bigger main menu that is more intuitive to press. Other than that, we made a drop shadow in each button of the main menu as a sign for the button can be pressed. This trick is the solution for the person that rarely uses software application such as Budi.