Depth analysis into creating a persona
The understanding of others is a significant aspect factor for meaningful product design. The word persona might have passed your workbench if you are a product designer and if you are into UX design. The UX designers use the personas to supercharge the UX design. The word persona helps designers to create their solutions, specific, non-generic and user-centred. The use of persona with the correct methodologies in empathy, make the UX designer similar to Professor X (If you have watch X-men, you know what I mean).
The topic — persona
If you ask, what is a persona from a couple of UX designers you can get few answers each different to another. The reason behind this is the context of use for personas in for aspects of the projects. The personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. UX designers use different types of personas to get relevant information from the target audience. Personas range from a simple photo-personas to complex personas that capture behaviour patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, background information and the environment the current problem or problems exists.
Why are they important?
Building Empathy towards the focus groups
In simple terms, empathy allows the designers to see what the focus groups who engage with the current problem react to it. It is a complex topic, to begin with, and would take years to master empathy properly. To understand one’s emotions and behaviours, you should have good listening skills, observation skills and ability to understand their pains, needs and goals. With the help of the persona’s, the designers can
- Understand the user and their perspective about the problem(s), goals and needs. The persona can bring a structural understanding of the focus group the product used.
- Gain real user insights to the solution designed for the users. The designers usually stay on their perspective of the product. Product success or failer mostly depends on the designer’s view of the focus group. Gaining real insights will help the designer to make correct decisions about the direction of the product.
Stop you from falling in to design pitfalls
The designers use personas to shapeup the product strategy process. A proper understanding of the user and their goals, needs and pain points will help the designer to make decisions on what is needed and not needed to the focus groups.
Problems with current persona usage
As a designer, we tend to have little to no exposure with the possible or active focus groups due to our way of work. The designers create personas based on the assumptions for a particular problem domain. We call these types of personas, assumptive personas. An assumptive persona will describe a stereotype which is nearly an opinion based on how the persona going to be.
We design products based on our assumptions that humans are simple and easy to understand. Humans are complex beings with different needs. One of the best examples we could take for this is the Pink tax phenomenon often attributed as a form of gender-based price discrimination. The designers pay attention to the colour when coming to the applicability of the gender personation, and we assume that changing the colour can create an effect on the price of an item. The same product can take a different price based on the colour designed. We can formulate products by talking to a small group of people (or worse no one at all) and make assumptions base on what we see/hear from the interviews or focus group session. The designer has to make a few assumptions to find trends for product usage and the goals and needs of people. The designers do a commendable job and end up with high-quality products that have less relevance to the problem domain.
Creating a data-driven persona
To create a data-driven persona, the designer can focus on taking both quantitive data and qualitative data research. The product that we design might or might not require research. It’s best to understand the problem domain and create solutions. If the problem needs the help of research, the designer can conduct research and collect both qualitative and quantitative data.
Quantitative data helps the persona to be more understandable though data collection and qualitative data will help the designers to make the findings on a personal level.
To capture the quantitative and qualitative data, the designers can conduct the following items.
Quantitative data
- Polls
- Closed-ended survey questions
- User testing data (based on other products)
- Metadata: age, gender, etc.
Acquiring qualitative data requires a slightly different approach. It means observing their behaviour patterns, their subjective mental models, their emotions and body language. The best way to gauge these aspects is to try the following:
Qualitative data
- Interviews (observe personality body language and emotions)
- Open-ended questions
- Shadow their day-to-day tasks
- Observe how they use other products
Direct interviews with your potential users and using surveys with open-ended questions helps reveal more about their thought and behaviour patterns.
When you have enough data in your hand, the designer should focus on the data representation. To represent the information, designers can use Affinity diagrams and empathy maps.
Empathy maps
An empathy map is similar to a persona in the sense that it is also used as a guiding light throughout the design process. It gives a detailed portrayal of the given user types by answering four simple questions: what the user thinks, says, does and feels. Overall, empathy maps are great tools to help designers, product managers, stakeholders and other team members to understand users better, gain empathy for them and get familiar with their behavioural patterns.
Affinity diagrams
Affinity diagrams that use sticky notes are a simple but effective way of taking both quantitative and qualitative data and ordering it into different sections.
If you put the information on different colour sticky notes for each section, it helps add further clarity to the visual representation.
Building your user persona
Using the data gathered for each user persona we can create, we should have the fundamental elements
- Demographics
- Goals
- Pains
- Behaviour
Other valuable elements that should make up your user persona include their influences — what affects his or her opinion (this can be a family member, a blog, trends or abstract ideas such as UX design).
The takeaway — user personas
Without a doubt, the user persona plays an important — if not fundamental — role in UX design. Whether it is a consumer app or enterprise software — designing with a user persona in mind is always going to increase its chance of success. The reason is that you are giving the user what they need as opposed to what you think they want.
A bonus is that user personas are also a great way to get interdisciplinary departments on the same page, as well as obtain client and stakeholder buy-in.
