Persona: Understanding Potential Users
Before we build and develop our product, it is very important to know our users’ demands. The design must be aimed on users’ need so it will be fit to our users’ expectation. But how? Apparently, personas are the best way to achieve it.
What is Persona?
Personas are fictional characters that we make our own that represent users that might use our service or product. These characters are vary from ages and fields that are developed based on research in order to know what the users need. We need personas to help us deliver our product so that it will be most relevant and useful to our users. Through personas, we understand our potential users’ behaviour, skill, and attitude.
Why do We Need Persona?
Maybe some of us think that creating personas is just wasting time. But let’s take a look how beneficial persona is:
Personas give stakeholders an opportunity to discuss critical features of a redesign.
Stakeholders sometimes have different and impulsive ideas. Those great ideas sometimes can be confusing if we don’t have priority. Since our main focus here is users, so we can use personas to find out users’ pain points and frustrations and make priority out of it.
Personas help the team to understand the user group.
Personas make the team learn about the user in a fun way (with stories and characters). It makes it easier to remember for the team when the team is working on the solution together.
Personas help designers develop wireframes and site architecture.
By building personas, designers will know users’ frustration and pain points. It helps designer to design and deliver application just like what user needs.
Personas provide a “face” to the user story, creating more empathy and understanding about the person using the product.
This prevents the team to be subjective and apply their own mental model which might not aligned with the user needs.
Characteristics of a Good Persona
There are a few characteristics of a good persona:
Persona matches reality
We may simply create our own character, but a persona is more than that. It is true that it is a made up names and faces, but the characters of a persona are based on real data obtained from research and observation. It reflects the real potential users of our product.
Persona helps us to understand users
A persona is expected to be able to describe the target group they represent the best way possible. It must contain a tiny detail of the character. This will represent the users’ scenario in using our product.
Persona is believable
The persona has to look like a real people. The best way to achieve this is finding a real picture of a person, picking an authentic name, and writing a convincing background story.
The Important Essentials of a Persona
- Name and Picture. The name and the picture represent the identity of the character. It make the character seems more believable. So we must find a picture that best represents our potential users.
- Age. The persona has to have an age that represents our target group. It helps us to design our product, for example, the theme and the style of a website.
- Education. Understanding user’s educational background helps us dictate what kind of word choice will be used on product’s content.
- Background. The background helps us determine the users’ motivation to use our product. The background can be represented by the user’s job.
- Skills. Understanding the skills of our persona helps us discover how technically skilled our users are and also discover the users’ pre-existing knowledge before using our product. We can find out whether the users are experts or not.
- Geography. It makes sure that our users won’t have the cultural or geography issues with our product’s content.
- Platform. We must understand which platforms they are using to access our product. For example, if they use iOS devices, we have to make sure that our product will be responsive on iOS devices.
- Goal. Understanding users’ goal helps us design a product that help users to achieve their goal. If they achieve their goal through our product, they will be so pleased and frequently using our products with no doubts.
- Motivation. It helps us to understand user’s scenario on using the product.
- Pain points or frustrations. It help us understand what the users don’t like. By understanding it, we can design products that avoid users’ pain points as much as possible so that the product will be comfortable for users.
But what makes user’s frustration that important?
Our main goal and purpose to make a persona is to focus back on the user and make a product that user needs. It’s important to know what things on app that user’s annoyed with, so in the future, the product will come out perfectly so the user will be comfortable and willing to use the product all over again.
Basically, just like its name, user’s frustration is user’s real problems that we want to solve with our product. Finding out user’s frustration really helps us to build product that offers a solution to users.
Besides that, user’s frustration can be seen as a feedback for the existing product. If you get user’s frustration and you solve it, your product will be much better from the existing product and users will definitely use your product without hesitating.
Take a look on this example.
Let’s pretend that we are building some kind of advanced e-library app mobile. Nerdy Nina here is one of our potential users. As we can see, she has 3 frustrations. One thing to remember, building this advanced e-library means we’re building something that solves Nerdy Nina’s problems. Let’s take a look on her frustrations:
- Keeping track of different series. Since Nina is a fan of many different series, she needs a tool that help her to keep track of different series. By knowing this, we can offer solution on our app by providing a feature that enables user to bookmark his/her last read page on a series.
- Forgetting a book launch date. There’s so many going on users’ life, it’s merely possible for user to remember all book’s launching date. It would really help if our app can provide some kind of reminder and notifications to users for a book’s launching day.
- Finding space for more books. It’s really important for people who read a lot to have an enough storage for keeping their books. I mean, maybe that’s why they use e-library on the first place instead of physical library, to provide more “shelfs”. To solve this kind of problem, we can provide more storage for users, where users can save books they like to read, books they are reading, or they lifetime favourite books.
How do We Make Persona?
Take a closer look at the data
What does it mean? It means user interview! Prepare our most essential insights, in other words, the primary problem and not to mention, stakeholder’s point of view. But as we know, user interview may take time and money. So how if we don’t have the chance to do user interview? Apparently, it’s okay to create personas on your own. But we have to avoid fictional profile. Fictional profile here means a profile that is not related with the problem we encounter. Always remember the primary problems and stakeholder’s business goal.
Identify patterns
It’s time to analyze the data and see if overlap emerges naturally. Connect every interviewees to the primary problem and the business goal and identify the patterns. Those patterns will lead us to scenarios and helps us to understand our users.
Create a Persona
Create a persona that consists of essentials explained above and don’t forget to deliver it with good design!
Persona on our Project
Currently, me and my team are having an Android and iOS project. We are building an application for lawyers to answer the questions from anonymous clients about law. The users for this application are lawyers, vary with age and specialist fields. Here are three personas of the application:
We make three personas to represent all users of the application. There’s Khalid Murfis representing fresh graduates, Olivia Sutandi representing working mom, and Reinhard Hotma representing senior lawyers.
So how many personas are needed? 3–5 personas are enough to represent our target group. They’ll guide the ideation process and help designers to create good UI/UX in order to make the most comfortable product as possible for the users.
