Design Persona — Can It Change The Reader’s Heart?
If you ever played a game called Persona 5, you’ll know their tagline “Take your heart”. In UX (User Experience) we have also what we called “Persona”. It won’t take your heart, but knowing what Persona is will for sure change your heart.
What is Persona?
Personas are made up of profiles, which you made from long research. Persona is made to represent the user whose gonna use your service, site, or brand.
Taken from Adobe Blog, it said that:
A persona is presented in a one or two-page document. Those pages descriptions include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and background information, as well as the environment in which a persona operates. We usually add a few fictional personal details in description to make the persona a realistic character, as well as context-specific details (for example, for a reading app it makes sense to include a persona’s favorite font and lighting).
Does it Important?
It is!
Crafting personas will make your understanding of the user’s need better. Not only that from personas you can picture the experiences, behaviors, even the goal of the users. It will make you realize that each of your users has different needs and expectations about your product.
Personas also will be your foundation in making ideas. They can help you maximize the experience the users will receive.
The Classification of Persona
Samantha Pede in her article said Persona generally can be classified into 2: Marketing Persona and Design Persona.
Marketing Personas focus on demographic information, buying motivations and concerns, shopping or buying preferences, marketing messages, media habits, and such. They are typically described as a range (e.g., 30–45 years old, live in Australia or Japan), and explain customer behavior but do not get to why behind it. What they are not good for is for defining a product or service — what it is, how it will rok, and how it will be used; or for prioritizing features in a product or service.
Design Personas focus on user goals, current behavior, and pain points as opposed to their buying or media preferences and behaviors. They are based on field research and real people. They tell a story and describe why people do what they do in an attempt to help everyone involved in designing and building a product or service understand, relate to, and remember the end-user throughout the entire product development process. Design personas are good for communicating research insights and user goals, understanding and focusing on certain types of users, defining a product or service, and avoiding the elastic user and self — referential design.
See how it helps a lot? But now, how to make them?
Creating a Persona
You can’t blindly create a persona with whatever you think, there are steps to creating personas.
Define Your Target Range
Start with a list of the different segments that you deal with. Whether it’s a doctor, nurse, postman, programmer, or even a designer.
Define Target’s Life Background
It’ll be hard if you only know the gender and age of the personas. There’s a basic guideline to map your target’s life background.
- The place they live in.
- Genders.
- Their education level.
- Their income.
- Their jobs.
- Their family members.
Define Their Point of View
You should start finding their view. For example, Political Opinions, beliefs, and characteristic
Knowing this information will give you a handle on what will be going on in their heads when they visit your website.
- Do you understand their dreams?
- Do you know what goals they trying to achieve?
- Do they care about politics?
- How about their personality?
- If they want to share their information, why?
There’s a little hack for this one. You can try to get all this information by simply visiting social media. In social media, people tend to open up about their perspectives and way of life. Find an example of a person you think he/she represents, then check their social media.
Make Them Feel Emotional Connection With Your Product
Try to answer some of the personal problems of the target user.
- What they have been searching for?
- Their everyday problems.
- What behavior do they usually do?
Give Them Identity
Get a picture somewhere! There are hundreds of foto template websites. Take one and put names on the subject. Put the information that you’ve been searching above next to the subject photo.
Ask Others Their Opinion About Your Personas
Ask the people closest about the persona you made. Is there anyone that can they find to be related to? Their answer will confirm whether the persona you made is a real person or not.
And here I’ll give you examples of personas that I’ve made for a project in college:
Final Touch
As you can see from the personas above, I took one example. For Ridwan Kamil, I made a role in the project which as a coordinator he can personally see the progress of praktikum. He can also keep in check Supervisor Sekolah and Lembaga as his frustration.
Your product should be effective. Zero waste. All the features that I made clearly crafted to be used by Ridwan Kamil so it’ll solve all Ridwan Kamil’s frustration. Besides that, a good system is a system that wanted by its user. The website that I made also crafted to fully fill what Ridwan Kamil expects and wants.
By this, the product we made will be loved by our users.
Change The Reader’s Heart
So you have made your own design persona, and then what? for starters based on the persona’s frustration and story, you can make the most comfortable website for your website’s visitor. Like if most of your visitors are elder people then you can’t make an advance UI/UX for them. If it’s teen or adult then you can make an advanced UI/UX for them. Just adjust based on what kind of people your web site's visitors are.
The possibility is endless. You can even make a comfortable mood for your website’s visitor with color science. For reference, I put the link in here. Just with color, you can make a suggestion to the visitor to buy things. It's vice versa, a bad color choice can make a visitor do the opposite.
For me, the best website is a website that doesn’t bore the visitor. A website that fun to navigate, and can surprise the visitor. A persona can also make your website not to be overly featured. Only put features that your website’s visitor needs.
And now that you know what persona is, don’t make the same mistake twice. Make your own persona!
