Personas and Why Do We Need It?

In software engineering, we develop a software to satisfy the needs of our targeted user. So everything we do there, we do it for the users. Of course it does. What does a software mean without someone using it, right?

So, in order to meet the requirements and satisfy the user’s need, we need to know, or at least estimate, who are going to use our software, and what do they actually need from it. This is why we need persona.

Persona

Persona is a way to picture a group of user we are targeting into a single fictional character. Since every humans are completely different than the others, persona is an effective way to depict a broad range of user’s behaviors into a much simpler representative fictional characters. This fictional characters represent behaviors that a certain group of targeted user may have in common, such as characteristics, goals, needs, demands, experiences, and frustrations, or some say constraints. The software may have various purpose, so there may also be multiple personas created. It is all depends on the users.

What are Personas For?

Even in the definition above, the benefits of personas already mentioned. Beside those, the benefits of personas are:

1. Get to know the users, and how they feel — we already got most of user’s data, and make a representation of it. From this, we know what the users will need, like, and what they don’t. This is the main value in building a product that ensures customer’s satisfaction, and making sure that the user will come back to use it again.
2. User centered — as mentioned before that it is all about the users, personas help developers to focus on the features that the users needs the most, rather than a fancy feature that users don’t actually need.
3. Consistency — since every user has been classified into groups, the development team can have a consistent understanding of the users, making them easier to analyze users data and make a conclusion out of it, to make a better product.
4. Time saving — a software can have tens, hundreds, and even thousands of users. Classifying them into groups may save you a lot of time from gathering too many user’s data and analyzing them all.

How to Create Persona

1. Collect user’s data — can be done by interviews, surveys, or other more suitable methods.
2. Group the users — find similarities between responses collected, and use them to put the users in specific groups.
3. Generate the persona — extract the data from the created groups, and make a persona out of it. Add characteristics, goals, needs, demands, experiences, and frustrations of the users grouped to the persona.
4. Share the personas to development team and the stakeholders — it is very important that everyone involved in the project knows about the users too.

My Personal Experience in Creating Persona

In the Software Project course that I took this semester, me and my team is developing a Document Sharing Platform, a web-based application used to share documents in specific professional areas. After a long discussion between the developer team and the partner’s Product Owner, here is one of the personas created:

We use a template from an online platform to make the personas. Some of them even provide the basic attributes that needs to be included in the persona, such as the users background and goals. We just added some more important things that are not included in the templates.

Quick Summary on Why Are Personas Important

You are developing a software for students. You wanted to increase the interest in reading among students by making a book-borrowing application. You didn’t even care to make a persona. No research on the user or anything. Then you started to build this software, giving fancy features and make design based on what you think is good.

When the product delivered to the schools that has make an agreement with you before, it turns out that your design didn’t make the students interested. It’s too boring they said. The students also confused on using this app. ‘What is this and what it does?’. You have no other option than to start the design process again, and not to mention setting the new navigation system in the application to make it more understandable for the students. All the fancy features becomes pointless since the target user didn’t even understand how to use it. That is why we need persona (unless you wanted to end up like the above example).