Persona — Do we need them?
What is Persona? you might ask. For some, it is just a normal word with no meaning at all. But for a Web or Software Designer, persona is one of the most important design tool that you should really know (and make).
So what is Persona?
Just think of it as a representation of people. But not just any people, people that need and want to go to your website — target users you could say. Persona acts as a tool to help guide a designer to make decisions about things. They also helps the designer to know what kind of challenge and frustrations that will be there when the product is finished.
Cool, how can i make one?
Before you do any work on making one, make sure you know the answer to this following questions:
- Who is this Person? This literally means who the person is. What is their name, age, occupation, location
- What is their habit/behaviours? Knowing a person’s behaviour(or habit) is important in making a persona. Let’s say you want to make an app to help people find where the nearest train station is. If we know that someone’s habit is to use train as their daily mode of transportation, then surely your app will be helpful for that person. A person’s behaviour indicates things that they was, is, and will do.
- What is their Goals (and Frustrations)? By knowing a person’s goals and frustrations, we can know for sure if our product meets the person expecation or not. Same thing applies for a person’s frustrations, we can know if our product is in no way solve their problems. By knowing these two things, we can conclude if the product that we’re going to build is actually helping these people, or instead complicate things.
By knowing the 3 things above, you can already create a simple persona. But, another question arises from the explanation above:
How can i find the people?
There actually are a couple of ways you could find the people. First is by conducting interviews. This is an extremely valuable method to gather information, but sometimes interviews poses their own problems. Time to gather people, interviewing each of them one by one, is just one of many disadvantages of using this method. Social media, on the other hand, can be a handy substitute. You can find almost everything on social media now — from a person’s hobby to their frustrations. Surely this seems like a really effective, but this also poses a problem of time-consuming. Finding a people’s data is a lot of work. Now let’s say time is not on our side right now, what can we do?
Assumptive Personas is your answer. It is an educated guess about the people that will eventually be your target user. This educated guess is based on a meeting with Designer, Development Team, and also the Client. This method of creating a persona also uses the 3 question that are mentioned above, as a foundation to make one. Assumptive Persona eliminates all the time-consuming problem and introduce a method of effeciency in making a Persona.
Here’s an Assumptive Persona that my Software Engineering Project teams created — for an auction-based marketplace:
Now it seems like you are beginning to understand this whole Persona thing, but another example would be good to enhance your knowledge more, right?
Let’s say you wanted to create an all things gaming forum. People can help each other, communicate with each other, and also improve each other. Before we create that, we obviously need to create a Persona, which i will include it below:
This examples of Persona that i have created will hopefully teach you a lesson, but, Do we really need Persona?
That’s a good question! and yes you need it. Bye!
What??! We need explanation!
I am just messing with you guys, of course i will explain it. So why you need it? because it allows you to know what kind of users that will use your product that you are tiredly creating. More importantly, it will show your products’ selling point. Now selling point is important, because it will differentiate your products with anything that is similar to your products.
But, i created a product that no one has ever created, so i don’t need Persona right?
Most of the time, the product that you created has already been created. Thats the bitter truth, but yes, it happens quite often. But if you are somehow create a product that no one has ever created, then Persona is absolutely necessary for you to create. Since you have nothing to compare it to, you need to create something that will attract people to try your product. As we all know, humans beings are scared to try something new. Saying like “take a leap of faith” shows that humans are particularly hesitant to try something out of their comfort zone. Now this will be challenge for you, i know, but Persona will overcome this. Creating things that people never experienced are hard, but if you know what kind of people that will jump into your product, what is unique about your product, and how your product will help people, i am pretty sure people are fine taking a “leap of faith” into your products.
Answering the main question, do we need Persona? Yes, absolutely. It is a framework of a Product Design, that allows us to know what kind of people that are going to use your product. We can also know their goals and frustration, so building the right product for the right user is the main goal, what suits them and not suits them. Getting to know people’s habit is also important, because by then we can know what the people is like. While it may seem only important to the Designer, it is also important to the Developer. by having Personas, the Developer can know what kind of features that might be worth implementing or not.
Persona really helps, you know. Why don’t u try to create one?