User-Focused Design and Personas

As designers, we should be comfortable with the practice of coming at a problem from the user’s perspective.

During the scoping phase of a project, we ask a lot of questions to help us get into the “guts” of a project: Who is the market? Who is the end user? Who are we designing this thing for? Thing is: it’s really tempting to insist you’re designing for the user and let your own personal preference creep in. I can’t count the number of times I have to reiterate the focus on the end user through the design process. Not just to the client — who will, invariably, let their own taste influence their feedback if they haven’t been properly educated in how crucial it is to avoid that — but it’s also my duty to remind myself. As designers, sure, we’ve got great taste and we pay a lot of attention to all the ways of communicating to specific goals (or at least we should…) but we need to be just as well practiced at designing for actual, human users, and those designs should help them attain their goals without our bias tiptoeing in.

It’s all very noble to *say* we’ve got the users in mind as a cover to do the thing the way we want to do the thing. That kind of well-intentioned guesswork does not a good product make. How do we take the “in theory” user-based design, and put it into actionable practice and improve user experience?

The answer is research-driven personas.

“[Personas are] a powerful communication tool that helps developers and managers understand design rationale and prioritize features based on user needs.” — Cooper, Reimann, Cronin; About Face 4

See user persona below for the mentor-matching project I’m working on:

Data pulled from interviews and affinity diagrams can reveal both user behavioural patterns, and marketing opportunities to build your scenario-based approach to a design. A Persona gives you something to point back to when analyzing goal, design, and feature development.

Affinity mapping. My research showed pain points and opportunity gaps for women working to advance in their careers, but without access to the personal or professional network to get the advice they needed.

With a combination of surveys and interviews I collected hard data and gained insight into individual personality characteristics that could be distilled into the user persona of “Anya”, above. This research and its resulting persona is just the first step in user focused experience that I’ll use to inform next steps in the design process, including my MVP, application features, user flow – and of course – design interface. In practice this research would be an iterative process as we continue to test “who we work for” and gain new, useful data on our user and their goals.