User Experience and Personas
Whenever you want to create good user experience for your software you’d want to create something called a persona, and no, it’s not something from a video game series that goes by the same name. Persona is a tool by software developers to help guide them design the right software for their target users. In this article I would like to explain the proper steps to create a good persona.
It Starts with Data
Before considering what a kind of software you want to make you must first know what target audience of your software even wants. If you have the time and/or resources you might gather the required data from methods such as surveys and if you don’t you can still question your stakeholders or analyzing your competitors and if you don’t even have that even guesswork would suffice given that it can be projected to a realistic user persona.
Pick Up the Patterns
When you have sufficient data you can start analyzing trends, the overlapping data can be categorized to certain type user. For example, if you’re building, say, an online shop app you might find a housewife might want a wide selection of household items available or maybe a car enthusiast wanting a comprehensive search feature to find a really rare spare part.
Creating the Persona
The common persona feature the following:
- Picture
- Name
- Description
- Goals and Frustrations
- Various information of the user
Let’s describe each in detail.
Picture
A picture or photo of the user gives them identity and gives you or your team an idea of type of user this persona represents.
Name
A name helps you further build an identity of the user and can even be used in discussions or as research materials.
Description
A summarization of the fictional character of a user you have created. The description should contain relevant information to the character such as background, motivation, desires, etc.
Goals and Frustrations
What a persona wants to achieve and what hinders them presents a particular set of problems for your software this section contains what a user type wants from your software and problems they want solved.
Summary
In short, personas is handy tool in determining the correct design path your software by way of representing what the users of your software would and would not want from it. Do remember that personas do not represent a single user but a particular type of users that have similar needs and problems and it does take some skill and knowledge to extract a meaningful persona from the data you should have. Also, when you’re done creating persona remember to share them with your team because they help bring about thoughts in a different perspective which will ultimately lead to having your software being user-driven and user-oriented.
