I am sorry, Persona
A letter of apology….
In my last article about Usability Testing, I wrote that even though Usability Testing is the more effective way on researching UX designs compare to Personas, we still can incorporate both ways for the best results. Now here I am telling you, you should. Persona is a great tool and when combine with other, the amount of things you get in return is worth it, but do remember, to get these things, we need to do Persona right.
The Pitfalls
If you have tried using persona (and failed), you would think that persona’s is a waste of time. Don’t worry, I also did. But after some reading and talking with other people that do, find Persona to work for them. I think you and I fall to the common pitfalls about Persona. Here are some:
You gotta believe
Okay I know it seems cliche or very “not scientific” but you need to know not every tool are scientific. Sure an example like integral is an analytic tool we use to solve many problems, but we also use surveys as a tool in scientific research to gather data which most often are not numbers and analytics but qualitative and abstract data. If the researcher didn’t invest in it’s survey, that research is doom to fail, same goes with Persona. You need to invest in your persona from the making of it to the implementation of your design to make it work. If you have bad past experience with persona, let’s brush that aside and start clean.
It’s not about the character card
When you first learn about Persona, it’s likely you were told to make this kind of cards.
From there you may think that is all about Persona. It just those cards that people make at the beginning and never use again. I know I did, but Persona is meant to be the idea those cards interpret.
Good, or at the very least, working, personas are made in a long discussion between the stakeholder and the development team. This is meant so that everyone knows what, how, and why each persona is made. The cards are just to remind everyone about the basic idea of each persona, but what concept does each persona represent may run much deeper and wide.
The Scope of Persona
Now on the more practical pitfall, is the scope of your persona. When learning about persona, maybe you were tasked to make your persona by generalizing your user into these character cards, then try to design based on those cards. This is wrong.
Persona are not just a generalized fictional character of your user. Persona can be a generalized character subset of your user, but it can also be more specific. It depends on your goal for that persona.
Say if I want to market my game. I can use Persona to generalized my target audience for my game. There would be the-kid-with-his/her-parent-credit-card Sam, the-working-adult James, and the-cheapskate-and-pirate-loving Jack. These persona that I just created were very generalized in that it uses high level data which is income. So with these personas I can plan out what marketing move I should make, should I put on a E3 panel to market my game, or I could just go off market my game on Steam. Should I do a pre-order tactic, or should I do an indie-style tactic.
Now if I want to make a downloadable content (or DLC for short) for my game, I could also use Persona but I can’t use the old personas for marketing because the goal is different. In this run, I would create a more specific persona, such as the-hardcore-gamer Michael, the-casual-gamer Mitch, the-story-loving Joshua, and the-grind-gamer Jake. These personas are more specific in that it use lower level data such as what part of the game they like, how much time they play the game, and so on. So with these personas I can plan out what kind of DLC would it be, would it be a story-rich DLC, or a grind-inducing DLC.
To get something out of your persona, you need to know what kind of scope of Persona you need for your goal. If your scope is to generalized, you wouldn’t be able to get anything from it, resulting a fail Persona.
References:
