Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

I’m That One Angry User Writing Blog Post at 3AM — Get To Know Your Product Audience!

Hocky Yudhiono
Bootcamp
Published in
8 min readFeb 27, 2022

--

His name is Hocky Yudhiono, 19 years old penultimate student 🥇 who is trying to accomplish his software engineering project deadline because he is lazy 💤! He plays game all day, being a stupid person he is 🦆, he ignores his duty to study. He have some 3 blog post assignments deadline coming 12 pm noon, he haven’t submitted any one of those. It’s impossible for him to deploy a blog website. He should find a good, simple, and free website to use! 🕸

That, is m̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶d̶i̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶r̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ ̶n̶o̶w̶ what called a Persona. Something that represents a user that is going to use your products. Okay, the above narrative is a bit exaggerated.

Meaning, Semantics, True Form, Definition of Persona

I was about to ctrl + c and ctrl + v this part, from a random website, but being a caring person 😳 I didn't.

Persona is a fictional user tryna use our product, by summarizing everything about him/her.

When creating persona, you need tons of research, survey, and information about those people that will use your system. This might seems utter cake. But trust me, they are really useful. Persona is created to see something in front of other’s perspective, what are their expectations, characteristics, purposes, what they’re trying to achieve, their condition — academically, economically, or from any aspects you would like to represent, it’s actually quite flexible to design a persona, and there’s no one true form of standard as they’re can be adapted according to your needs.

With that data, you can use it to design a good system for them (The users you made from your persona), and your team can think more about what if you see the application from their side. This will make your developer team be more caring when designing user interfaces and giving them the best experience!

Source: https://blog.fluidui.com/are-your-interfaces-as-simple-as-possible-but-no-simpler/

Confessions

I’m going to shamelessly admit I’m taking inspirations of content from the interaction system courses I’ve taken last semester (hehe) 😆. But I’ll wrap it with my own buns, to make a delicious and easy to swallow on everything about persona.

Who’s The First One?

In 1980, Mr. Alan Cooper created something that’s a must for every computer science student to study, that is Persona. There are several ways on how to design an application. One of them is User Centered Design. Meaning all the requirements are (mostly) generated from the personas we’re making. This design method is one of the popular and most used nowadays.

Great Image of Mr. Alan Cooper

Who Used This “Persona” Thing?

Persona are basically referred by the everyone related in the projects. Especially UI an Information Architecture designer.

Trust me, those are the guys who find it easy to make wireframe but doesn’t know how hard it is to code it 😭.

Personas are being made to handle some serious issues:

Thousands of Users, 🌊, Thousands of Requests: We don’t really know precisely how something should be design. User A wants this, User B wants this, we don’t know how to prioritize who goes first, who goes later.

  • With persona, you can sort this out in a meeting to prioritize which one are the more important requests.

Narcistic, Mr. Know-it-all Designer/Developer, sometimes the designer can use their own perspective when designing something, assuming the users using it are already fluent with newer stuffs. But sometimes reality is not so good, or maybe developer assume too much. Let’s take a case study I recently see in my Facebook page (Read: Meme Source).

  • 🍎: Indonesians use DD/MM/YYYY lol why would you bother using other formats, other formats are plain stupid
  • 🍊: No, MM/DD/YY Supremacy lol
  • 😎 (Chad Programmer): date.format("YYYY/MM/DD-hh.mm.ss") goess brrrrrrrrr

Just, make sure this kinds of issue is not showing in your product review. For example, create a way for user to customize their own date formatting preference.

I coded It, No one uses it, so sad, F to Pay Respect, this persona will hold your team back prioritizing a certain feature in the production if it’s rarely be used.

I Want to Make Persona, How?

Spongebob

Persona isn’t a “poof, here it is”-magic show I told you once again. Its complexity based on how deep you research your target user (on a new product) or existing user (maintaining existing system) 🧙‍♂️.

Persona needs to represent groups of people, and based on real people! You need those interviews, surveys, and even more serious, usability testing on existing prototypes of your product! 😲

Grab your Pen, do Research!

For the least, if you don’t have time, go observe and interview some people around you! It can be your known friends, or just random friendly fellow from the internet 😊. In a research, focus on some specific topic you want to drill, then gather all the “main element points”, and categorize those into some groups of “possible persona”. Now, add those background story of your persona 🌊, then share it with everyone in the team! Remember, you’re doing this all together with your team! So less bias towards the persona results.

Here are some cheat questions you can use:

Credits: Interaction System Slides by Dadan Hardianto, M.Kom. and Lintang Matahari Hasani, M.Kom

Standard? Baseline? Benchmark?

What should my persona result look like? In my software engineering project, we created 3 main personas of our user. Let me attach those! Kudos to Hasiana “ansqee”, Jonathan “jojonicho”, Asfiolitha “asfiowilma”, Eko “morphism”, Gani “ganiirsyadi”, Steven “stevenwh” for their effort and take on making this as well 😎. It’s in Bahasa Indonesia, but you got the main point 🙏.

Not a must, but sometimes for web products — mobile app, web app, you need:

  • Comfort or Familiarity Level of Technology 🐭
  • Goals, Need, Expectatations, and Motivations, what and why user trying to achieve 🥇
  • Responds, the attitude on how user acts, his/her behavior 🥣
  • Pain Points/Frustations of user, something that making the user can’t achieve their goal. With this, our product will take place and trying to solve it (but not always)💖

And, sometimes name, age, occupation, location, and background education would help more to picture your user segment! 😲 This is kind of counter intuitive when first making persona. But turns out, this way, we know more about what someone would do in their generation 🦷.

The Big Ice Wall

Queen — Don’t Stop Me Now MV

If life was just as easy as this, UI designer would be mushrooms in the wood 🍄.

Data Availability

UX Research somehow can’t do their research on real end users!

Oh no! What should we do? Solution:

  • Ask for user expert!. E.g the one who studies on these user segments or any one who ever worked on these kinds of topics. They should know about it right? It can costs money and time, but this is one of the way.

“Do You Think These Personas Are Enough?” -Asked someone from the team

Sometimes we don’t know how much personas do we make, do all these personas enough to cover our user requirements? Are we making to much? Solution:

  • Just create some extra personas, then pick the significant ones you and your team would make it work ✔.
  • Ask for opinions from people outside the team 😂.

I’m Lazy Making Persona, Got No Time to Research

Take a day off! Sometimes we can stuck thinking and researching too much. Take your time to make the best out of the best personas. Don’t let the “hurry-ness” makes your persona bad.

Are We Finished?

Not yet, one last stuffs 🍀. Those steps above are actually not the “only way” for you to create persona. Mr. Page Laubheimer said, there are 3 main ways (alternatives) on how you can create this persona thing!

Interviews Can Be Done

Personas this way can be made by using “Qualitative Research”, for example the essay on your survey, interview, or text input on an online survey can result in Qualitative Points. Then you can categorize them. This persona is called Qualitative Persona!

Interviews Can Be Done, + Numbers, Numbers, Numbers, and More Numbers

Hoyoverse’s Genshin Impact Survey 🤡

My fellow Genshin Impact tabibito 🍁 getting 30000 Moras (Moras are the in-game gold currency) when this survey came! This way, our lovely Hoyoverse can confirm those category of pain points using statistics! These kinds of persona that can be created are called Statistical Persona.

I assume <insert most impossible thing here>

When UI or UX designer create their own “assumption” persona, it’s not impossible. This persona is called Proto Persona, which then should be developed again, of course! 🚁

Besides Those Three

There are:

  • Design Persona: More on goals, behaviors, and pain points. The ones my team made was more on this one!
  • Marketing Persona: More on preference, motivations, behavior, and demographic. Those fancy graphs and heatmaps are considered being in this category 🔥!

How We Kickstart our Software Engineering Project

Talking about this semester, our team was assigned to a mobile one-stop cryptocurrency platform 🪙. Before we’re making the user interface design, and the overview of our PRD, we have gathered several informations about people in the Internet about their cryptocurrency experience. In Indonesia itself, cryptocurreny is not that “common” between us teenagers. The crypto enthusiasts tend to gather and communicate against each other with themselves 😁.

Cryptocurrency is not that easy to learn as well. There are a lot of new terms and vocabularies that revolve around cryptocurrency. So, we had to do our own researches as well before we’re creating the persona, Then, we gather the assumption of persona from our client and friends that already have a knowledge on this topic 📚.

Basically, we’re making a proto persona, but it’s based on the common stereotypes about each of our possible end users. Then we build 3 personas, that is categorized by their knowledge 🧠, basic, familiarity and the investment frequency on cryptocurrency.

This persona is used in our projects so much. For example, we’re considering adding tips on this app, because we know it might not be all the known for all of our users about what is passphrase in cryptocurrency 👍.

End Words

Persona is really useful if you utilize it well. Now, you know some basic stuffs about persona. When developing your own projects, you may not need to create and share this with everyone, just keep a Markdown notes to list the requirements of your users 📝, and you should be good! Now go!

--

--

Bootcamp
Bootcamp

Published in Bootcamp

From idea to product, one lesson at a time. To submit your story: https://tinyurl.com/bootspub1

Hocky Yudhiono
Hocky Yudhiono

Written by Hocky Yudhiono

Fullstack Developer 💻, Competitive Programmer 🐭, Blogger 📝, Eager Learner 💤 | https://hocky.id/

No responses yet