What is Persona and how to develop it to enhance the design process?
Persona is a fictional character as a basis for companies to design and advance their products or services. A persona contains goals, motivations, needs, frustrations etc that can be used to generate as well as criticise any design ideas.
Why having personas is important?
Our target customers are varied in their attitudes and behaviours, and they are usually mixed up. Creating personas can help to collect these attributes and make several typical fictional characters for further usage.
Personas are treated as the foundation of any products and services, and also align the directions and expectations of different departments. Any time they design or promote, personas are references to ensure their ideas matched the attributes of personas.
How to develop personas?
The attributes of personas are extracted from the target users, and the best way to understand them is through user research.
To thoroughly understand users, user research is recognised as the most effective and practical method. We can do in-person interviews, diary studies and even some contextual inquiries along fields works. During the interviews and studies, we observe how users interact with the product or service, and then understand their needs and expectations. All these are essential ingredients to create personas.
Here are a few steps to creating personas:
1. Write down all attributes in post-it notes
2. Select and sort the attributes into groups
3. Get a user to be the reference of the persona
4. Review grouped attributes along with products/services
- Write down all attributes in post-it notes
Attributes collected can be anything. Before deciding which are applicable to creating personas. They are all worth to be written down in post-it notes. For example, a user asking for friends’ comments before purchasing is an attribute, and a user spending several hours commuting can also be an attribute. Write them all on post-it notes, and never miss any suspicious attributes. Even though it is quite time-consuming, it could help to consolidate what we researched.
2. Select and sort the attributes into groups
The second step is selecting which attributes are valuable, and grouping them accordingly. A little trick to make the selection more efficient is to sort out the polar attributes first. When we find a user only buys if there are some special offers or discounts, we can then check out if any user doesn’t care much about the price. These two polar attributes can be portfolios of two personas. Generally, 3 to 4 personas are created for a product or service, therefore, grouping attributes into 3 to 4 groups is reasonable. Trying to figure out the connections between these attributes to make the groupings more convincing.
3. Get a user to be the reference of the persona
After groups are formed, it’s time to get an interviewed user as a model for making personas. Undoubtedly, it is impossible to find a real user 100% matched to a persona but how much should be enough for a model user, around 70% matched would be fine. This model user’s interviews and other materials can be references for making the persona, especially the background section. As we mentioned, personas are only fictional characters, but we make them real-life persons that help companies to empathise with them. Only companies can empathise with their target users, they can’t develop the products or services desired.
4. Review grouped attributes along with products/services
The last step is reviewing grouped attributes along with products/services to ensure they are useful. Some attributes are eye-catching but not very practical for enriching or improving products/services. We should always review attributes from the perspectives of the owner of products/services. If an attribute couldn’t create values for the product/service, we simply take it out. A good persona is about some extracted ideas, not a detailed report concluding all findings from the research.
Persona is vital for any development of products and services and can be applied at any stage of the development cycle. Either in the planning stage or for revamping, it can be used for deciding the features and functions of the product/service and how they can satisfy the desire of the personas.
