Using User Persona to Design PsychoTip’s UI and UX
When I delved into UI design the first time, I’ve never heard of a “user persona”, and was absolutely clueless on how to make one or use them effectively. But after doing several projects, I’ve learned a lot about it and will try to summarize what I know in this review.
What is a User Persona?
In brief, a user persona is a fictional user, ideally based on real user research as part of the design process. The character, skills, priorities, and goals of this persona are used as a key point of reference during the rest of the design process.
There are several reasons why user personas are incorporated into a design process, but the most important reason is to ensure you are designing for your users as they are and behave. You don’t want to make the mistake of designing only for some of your users, or for users as you imagine to be, or something that you would like to use yourself.
For PsychoTip, there are two user personas used, which reflects the target users. One is a fictional client, and one is a fictional psychologist. The detail of both user personas can be seen below.
Incorporating User Personas into the Design
During the design process, we always try to remember the user persona and focus the design efforts on solving the user’s problems. We also designed a visual guideline based on the user persona, which will be explained in another article.
One design example is the chatroom. It can be seen from the user persona profile that the client’s main goal is to talk and share their concerns to a psychologist, while the psychologist wants to help clients and educate them about mental health. With this information, we decided to design a chatroom that is easy to use. The chat features voice notes and photo sharing, so that the client can elaborate their problems better with the psychologist.
We also tried to design an uncomplicated flow for the whole application, as most of the probable clients are already stressed enough from their life and we don’t want to add to that.
In the end, after the whole design is finished, we verified the design with all the stakeholders involved, and thankfully the approved it.
