Week #6: The Blessing of Persona
Let’s face it: product design is an abstract concept. Especially for someone like me — who simply lacks the creative skill and visual sense needed to design something aesthetically pleasing. I mean, hey, there’s a reason I’m decidedly not the hipster of this team. But even for seasoned design veterans like our hipsters Ale and Hanif, designing an application correctly is still quite a challenge.
Luckily, there is something that can help the design process go along smoother. Choosing color schemes, design styles, assets to use, they all get easier when you have an image of who they’re intended for. This is where a user persona comes in.
A what, now? User Persona?
User personas are fictional characters designed to reflect the types of users the product will have. User personas not only define who they are, but also what they do with the product in relevant contexts. Usually, a user research is conducted to determine the persona a certain product has — this way, the persona will help designers understand user characteristics, needs, and goals. It also gives designers valuable insights into user journeys.
All products have unique personalities, offerings, and goals — and each of those products have a unique set of users as well. It’s crucial that we study these users; their lifestyle, their expectations, their needs. This way, we can ensure that we are creating something that is specifically tailored for their needs, not ours. User personas help us keep on track of what we should design for the users, instead of listening to the voices in our heads telling us what we want the design to look like.
PsychoTip’s User Personas
As an online consultation application, PsychoTip mainly has two types of users: the clients and the psychologists. Based on the research our product owners did, they have created a user persona for each type of user. These are the personas we kept in mind while creating our high-fidelity prototype.
Above is the user persona for PsychoTip’s clients. As you can see, the persona — named Wulan, is a student. She is in her 20s, and she needs to be able to talk to someone when she feels the stress of juggling too many things at once. Being a millenial, Wulan primarily uses social medias in the form of Instagram and Twitter. As a professional content creator, she also uses LinkedIN to connect with her professional network. From her preferred social medias alone, we can predict what type of User Interface Wulan is used to. This will surely help us greatly in determining the layout of the UI for our application.
Now, meet Cahaya. She is our user persona for the role of psychologists. She is in her early 30s, and she works professionally as a psychologist. To her, PsychoTip will be a way to help more people, so they can get better and live a better life. Now, one thing that is noticeably different from the client’s user persona is the social media displayed. From there, we can see that aside from Instagram — also available in Wulan’s preferred social medias — Cahaya also uses Facebook. And so, that is one more reference we can take as to what kind of UI the client is used to, in addition to Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIN.
How do the User Personas Influence our Design?
So far, we’ve covered what user persona means, and the specific user personas for PsychoTip. This of course leads to the question: what do all of that mean for the design? Well! In this section, I will try to point out things that we designed with our users’ needs and expectations in mind.
Landing Page
This is our landing page. As you can see, it’s designed with a very minimalistic sort of style. We did this because we know that most of our users will be quite young, between the ages of early 20s and mid 30s. And as this article states, millenials are very much leaning towards a minimalist branding, as it helps them develop trust easier with the product itself.
Apart from that, we also selected the gradient of colors green, blue, and yellow for the design of our application. PsychoTip is designed for people who are ‘not at their right mind,’ so to speak. They are in dire need of someone to talk to, something to calm them down. This is partly why the color blue is chosen. It has been said to symbolize wisdom, trust, and has been known to cause calming effects on the psyche. Whereas the color green is supposed to symbolize life, energy, and renewal.
Dashboard
On the left, you can see the design of our application’s dashboard. We have incorporated a greeting on top, because greetings make people feel welcomed, and the application seem more personalized. And if you look to the bottom, we have a navigation bar full of icons. We chose each of these icons with our personas in mind. As we know, the personas are quite used to social media — particularly Instagram on both. These icons draw upon their familiarity with Instagram, so that they will instinctively know what each icon is supposed to represent, without us having to put the words themselves on the page.
Chat Page
This is PsychoTip’s chat page. Again, we’ve drawn upon the personas’ assumed familiarity with social media. We use icons commonly used in messaging apps, such as a right-turned arrow to symbolize send, and the plus (+) sign to symbolize more features. In this case, the ‘more features’ the sign will display is the option to send a picture or a voice note. We have given the users this option with the thought that clients who are experiencing severe depressive/anxiety episodes might not be able to type properly and would prefer to talk directly or send photos to the psychologists.
Aside from all of that, we also tried to design an uncomplicated flow for the application itself. We take references from social medias’ flows, and try to follow those flows as well as we can. For example, in Instagram, users typically have to go to their profiles to access the settings page. In our application, we have implemented the same thing, in hopes that the user will instinctively know what to do instead of having to search for how to access a feature in the application.
