Persona in a Nutshell

Steven Sim
7 min readFeb 27, 2022

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These people do not exist. (https://www.monsterchildren.com/these-people-do-not-exist/)

Software development means solving a lot of problems with what you are trying to make. But it doesn’t stop at just solving the problem. You have to also solve the problem well to the point that someone considers your “solution” to be what they have been looking for. For that reason is why UI/UX is very important in software development, as users are not only satisfied by their problems getting solved, but also the problem getting solved conveniently.

But the statement above left us with some questions. Whose problems are we trying to solve? What kinds of people have the problems that might use our solution? Who are they? With those questions in mind, a user persona might help you in answering those questions.

Definition of a user persona

In simple terms, user persona is a fictional person that represents a large group of people with problems that you are trying to solve. They should be created as if they were a real person and each persona should only represent a particular group. The groups themselves should be defined based on the research that you have done when researching about the problem domain of your software.

Why you should create user personas for your product

One of the most important reason is empathy. Looking back to our definition of software development as solving problems. We have to empathize with the people whose problems we are trying to solve. User personas will help you empathize as it will give you a better vision on who are the potential users of our product and how will they get interested in using our product.

One of the other reason is to present your research findings in a better manner. Let’s say that you have gotten into a conclusion that your product can mainly serve two kinds of groups with different problems. It will be definitely easier to imagine on how will the product solve the groups’ problems by representing the groups as an individual instead to relate to them better.

How to create a good persona for a product

  1. Define the group of users

The first and the most important step is to define what kinds of people are we trying to solve their problem. Although you should also consider that too much or too less groups will have a bad impact on your vision of the personas, so make sure to only define several unique groups that you can feel that they are “different” from each other

2. “Humanize” the persona

As the title suggests, we will act as if the persona that we created is a real person. Give them a real name, photo (you shouldn’t use a photo of someone that you know for better empathy), age, gender, hobby, occupation, what background are they from, etc. that might have an impact with their problem we are trying to solve. The more human they are defined as, the better you will empathize with them.

3. Give a more detailed info about their problems

Usually, a persona is written with these 4 points (or more/less based on where you gained your information):

  • Bio: a short description on who the persona is carried in 1–3 sentences.
  • Goals: given the problem that we have defined, what are they trying to achieve? or in what way they would prefer their problems to be solved?
  • Motivations: reasons on why they are trying to solve the problem
  • Frustrations (or pain points): a short and detailed explanation on the problems they are having related to the idea of the product

Usage of user personas in our case and how we implemented the best for them

In our case, we are making a university final project management system for University of Indonesia, which in short will be used for managing anything related to the final project such as final project proposals, final project defense schedule, and many more in University of Indonesia. After a series of research and discussions, we have come to a conclusion of four user personas as follows:

  1. Gasti, the final year college student
Gasti Kuswandari, the college student in her final years of studying

Let’s talk about Gasti, she’s a final year college student at UI and is currently doing her final project this semester. She wants a system that is already well-defined with what she is supposed to do and a better way to communicate with her potential lecturers that will guide her on doing her final project. Other than that she also feels a need for a better way to communicate her activity during her final project.

Considering her worries, we decided to create a system for her to report on her activities directly to the lecturers who will be supervising her final project.

Activity log reporting system that Gasti can use to report her activities to her lecturer

2. Mahesa, the newbie lecturer

Mahesa Dongoran, the young lecturer that had just started on guiding final projects

For the second persona, we have Mahesa, one of the new lecturers appointed to guide final projects starting this semester. His problem is similar to Gasti but from a lecturer perspective which he is still quite unfamiliar with how guiding final projects is done. With his problems in mind we decided to make sure that the applications will conform with the already existing constraints such as lecturer guidance quota or proposal lecturer assignment.

Other than that we also provided a way for him to share his ideas for final project topics to students easily since one of his frustrations also include hardships on communicating with students.

Final project topic ideas that can be seen by students

3. Darmana, the more senior lecturer

Darmana Hutasoit, the more senior lecturer that is not quite literate to technology

Another lecturer which is Darmana, but the difference is that he is already very familiar with duties as a final project guiding lecturer or grading student’s final project defense. The problem is that he is not quite familiar with using applications in general. With that in mind we decided to design the system to have less but more meaningful information to prevent him from getting confused on what is going on.

For example, after logging in, he is directly greeted by list of features he can use, and with direct information on what is being shown.

“Proposals that are submitted for you” is shown to make sure mr. Darmana is not confused on what is currently being shown

Other than that, we also had incentives to help him in monitoring students’ activity by creating a better version where he can also directly see the student’s final project topic and when was the last time the student filled in the activity log.

List of students before viewing activity log
Specific student’s activity log list

4. Farid, the academic administration staff

Farid Ridwan, the experienced academic staff

Lastly, we have Farid, the academic staff that has served the administration related to his faculty in UI. He is already quite literate in using applications as his past duties as an academic staff also required him to use similar applications. However from his point of view, the definition of “helpful” to him is most likely to be something that can prevent him from doing tedious and repetitive task that is also meaningful.

With that in mind, we decided to make sure administration tasks is able to be done in a bulk manner such as granting access to multiple students to the application in one time input. But also knowing on how the usual administration is done using Microsoft Excel files, we also provided a bridge for the feature to receive XLSX files still.

Feature that Farid can use to bulk register multiple students

But checking everything manually can be a pain, so with that we also considered Farid’s pain point in checking data manually to be checked automatically. For example the system can detect whether the data is duplicated, has wrong amount of inputs, or just invalid in general and will also show what was wrong with it.

Warnings that are also equipped with which lines are wrong in the input

With this automation of checking, Farid can immediately know which data is wrong and needs fixing.

Conclusion

User personas will definitely help you in defining what should be focused on for your product. However you must make sure that the product research that you have done to create the personas are already sufficient. At the end of the day, it is the users’ problem that we are trying to solve. Without empathy or an idea of what the users are thinking, then the solution that has been proposed might not be the perfect solution.

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Steven Sim

Site Reliability Engineer, always interested to learn more about DevOps and Cloud Computing