Reviewing Personas
So last time we’ve talked about Personas and SenangSegar’s implementation of it. This time, we’ll be reviewing other group’s Personas. We’ll discuss what’s good, what is lacking, as well as what can be improved with the Personas.
Moodah
From the snapshot above, we can see that the persona has described the profile, responsibilities, frustrations, and motivation of the fictional character. Each of these sections is laid out clearly for ease of reading. The color scheme of the Persona is also minimalistic, so it doesn’t distract the reader with absurd eye-popping colors.
Each section is also followed by short descriptions/questions that help the reader understand the meaning of the section titles. For example, in the ‘Key Drivers/Motivation’ section, there are the questions: “What makes the persona go to work every day? What makes the persona tick? What will the persona achieve?” next to it.
However, there are surely still several things that can be improved upon for this persona.
For starters, on the ‘Profile Attributes’ section on the right side of the snapshot, the sub-sections ‘Common titles (AKA)’ and ‘Verticals’ are not filled, which makes the persona seem unprofessional design-wise. The ‘Verticals’ sub-section does not have a clear meaning, too, and is not defined in the persona either — what does ‘Verticals’ mean in the context of ‘Profile Attributes’? Perhaps the sections that aren’t relevant for the persona of the group and are left blank, such as the ones above, should be discarded at all or at least be given dashes: “-” to show that they are intentionally left blank.
Moreover, as shown above, the description used in the Profile section doesn’t seem to complement the description in the ‘Profile Attributes’ section. The profile describes the character too generally — the character is described to be 53 years old in the ‘Attributes’ section, but the profile mentions how they could be anyone from their teens until someone who is of old age. The description should have been more specific to the character used in the Persona, and not make it so that it could apply to lots of different kinds of people — Personas are meant to be made with specific characters with specific personality traits and attributes.
The profile also does not provide an image of the character, which means there is less visualization of the character described.
UKM Indonesia
As shown in the snippet above, UKM Indonesia’s persona is quite thorough and detailed, especially compared to Moodah’s which mainly uses bullet points rather than full sentences. The descriptions in the sections give a very clear image of the Persona being described, especially compared to Moodah’s Persona descriptions which are more general.
The color scheme is also minimalistic like Moodah’s, although the red font color for the text may just make the persona seem less formal than if black were used. The profile also includes a photograph of the character, which helps make the character seem more realistic.
Unfortunately, there are still some sub-sections that are still unfilled, such as the one shown above. There are fewer empty sub-sections compared to Moodah’s persona, though. Again, to improve, these sections should be gotten rid of to make it cleaner.
When it comes to the heading of the Persona, the use of the ‘<’ and ‘>’ signs aren’t necessary as they tend to be used only for templates — the group should’ve discarded the signs when making the Persona. Because of these signs, it makes the persona less “proper” and seems like it was not made carefully.
Conclusion
All in all, both teams have made decent Personas, though there may be some things to improve on, especially design-wise. Content-wise, UKM Indonesia’s Personas seem to have more thorough explanations, which give a better image of the character, compared to Moodah’s Persona, which has shorter and more general descriptions of the character.
That’s all for my review of the other teams’ Personas. I hope you found this post useful!
