Personas: A simple introduction
“The details are not the details. They make the design.” — Charles Eames
Personas are fictional characters which is a representation of the real target audience data, collected in previous research phases such as user interview. Simply it is representing picture of your customers. These representations should be based on qualitative and some quantitative user research and web analytics. Personas are representing the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
This may help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Personas are distilled essences of real users. Personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on real data collected from multiple individuals. Designers should always create personas from observations about real users, personas should never be invented out of your assumptions about your users. Personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1–2-page descriptions that include behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character.
Personas offers several benefits in product development. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need. Defining personas helps the team have a shared understanding of the real users in terms of their goals, capabilities, and contexts.
Create Effective Personas
· Collect extensive data on target users.
· Determine the qualities of and differences between users.
· Develop a hypothesis from the research, determining the qualities of and differences between users.
· Ensure stakeholders agree on the hypothesis about the users.
· Create multiple number of personas — more than one per project.
· Name and describe each persona in 1–2 pages. (Should include User’s values, interests, education, lifestyle, needs, attitudes, desires, limitations, goals and behavior patterns)
The goal of personas is not represent all audiences or address all needs of the website but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important user groups. User personas are extremely useful to grow and improve a business: they help uncover the different ways people search for, buy, and use products, so you can focus your efforts on improving the experience for real people and use cases. Bring the Persona closer to home with an Empathy Map.
Different Perspectives on Personas
1. Goal-directed Personas
2. Role-Based Personas
3. Engaging Personas
4. Fictional Personas
