Easy guide to User Persona
A persona, in user-centred design, is a fictional character created to represent a user type that might use a site, brand, or product in a similar way.
What are the Benefits of Using User Personas in UX Design?
User personas have the main benefit of keeping the team focused on an outcome with a focus on how the user would perceive that outcome. They also help with preventing scope creep and self-referential design (e.g. designing the product as though the team or the team leader will be the user).
What Makes for a Good User Persona?
A user persona should:
- Elucidate observations from your research
- Focus on the now and not what might happen at a future point
- Be realistic and not seek to idealize behaviours or desires
- Help set out the groundwork of your user experience design task
It should also help you understand things about the user(s) themselves:
- The context(s) in which the product will be used
- The behaviours of the users at the moment
- The attitudes of the users in general
- The wants/needs from the product that you’re designing
- The difficulties that the user wants to overcome in their current situation
- Any objectives that the user may have
How Do You Create a User Persona?
There are a great number of ways to create user personas but a simple process would be to:
- Get a group of potential users and either interview them or observe them
- Look for patterns in their behaviours, responses, actions, etc. and then group the people that display such patterns together
- Then based on those groups, create archetypal models of the people (e.g. a stereotype)
- Build the user persona based on the stereotype but drawing out details of context, behaviour, need, etc.
- Disseminate the user personas among the team (and if necessary — seek feedback and amend them)
How are Personas Used in UX Design?
The persona is there to ensure that every effort made by the team considers the user’s voice. Failure to do this creates risks of failure in the design process itself.
When you create scenarios for product use, for example, the persona should be used to give that scenario context. It will then tell a story of how the product will be used rather than how we think it might be used.
In fact, user personas should always be combined with scenarios to create the most effective products. A user persona is only half of the “secret sauce” that UX designers can bring to bear when creating products.
There are 4 key uses of the persona in product design:
- Personas should be used to validate (or not) the decisions made by the design team. E.g. “is that what the user really needs?”
- Personas are used to develop priorities when ideas conflict for resources or time
- Personas should be available during ideation sessions to act as both a source of inspiration and to keep things grounded and focused on the user
- Personas should be referenced when critiquing ideas or iterations of the product
