Enhance your business with persona

What is persona in UX?

Personas are commonly used tools in UX design. It’s a representation of the real target audience data, collected in previous research phases such as user interview. It is suggested at this point to gather information from at least 6 interviews. The information collected will overlap and this is where you have to look for patterns. You can form personas from these overlapping information.

Personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. Persona representations include behavioral patterns, goals, motivations, skills, attitudes, and background information, as well as the environment in which a persona operates. By using personas, our entire team can stay focused and create a design that serves real users.

Why Is It Important?

Deep understanding of a target audience is fundamental to creating exceptional products. Personas help a product team find the answer to one of their most important questions, “Who are we designing for?” By understanding the expectations, concerns and motivations of target users, it’s possible to design a product that will satisfy users needs and therefore be successful.

How to develop it?

Develop user personas as fictional characters through brainstorming, workshops and quantitative or qualitative research, based on several different customer characteristics. Make them as specific as the demographic characteristics of a person. Of course, these always remain the “data” of a fictional person! Such as:

DEMOGRAPHICS

• Gender, age, place of residence
• Profession and field of work
• Marital status
• Financial status

When building user personas, going deeper helps. Imagine the kind of person it represents, other than their demographics. All this information remains usable in the future to properly determine the persona’s needs related to the product:

PERSONALITY

• Hobbies
• Favorite brands
• Do they follow trends?
• Media consumption habits, hours spent online
• What kind of gadgets do they use and how?

Lastly, don’t forget the personal attitude and possible history with the product. These answers should help in the actual UX design process; therefore, this information proves crucial for a UX designer. They need to know the persona’s relationship to the product category and the product:

RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PRODUCT

• Do they have previous knowledge about the product?
• In what context do they use the product?
• What are their motivations? Why would they use the product?

How to create a it?

How do I create UX personas?

Let’s get something straight right now: you probably need more than one UX Persona. It’s not enough to say “my product is for Brand Managers”. You need to be more specific than that and this means that during the persona development you will discover that a brand manager from a Fortune 500 company will have different needs than those of a brand manager of a startup. You need to take this into consideration and don’t make your product too niche.

An ideal number would be up to four UX personas — this gives you options to explore and address different users’ needs in order to create a product for the widest possible audience without targeting it as “for everyone” at the same time.

Know the users: who are they? Why would they want to use your product? What do they want to achieve by using it? How can they find out about your product?

Identify common factors: look for specific and repeatable metrics to discover common factors and then separate all possible groups.

Narrow your search: Filter the groups. You don’t need too many UX personas. The research process will only distract you from your goal.

Make it specific: Select a suitable person to represent your group and give this person a name. Choose an appropriate image of a person to represent a named group. Describe their character, their likes, dislikes (even the name of their dog). Make this UX Persona seem like a real person.

While creating UX Personas you should always ask questions. How else you’ll find out who is the perfect user? Remember to split your questions into few groups that will help you to organize your ideal user’s data.

Personal

• What’s your name?
• How old are you?
• What is your occupation?
• What is your education?
• What do you do in your free time?
• Add a picture.

Needs and goals (professional)

• What do you want to achieve?
• Why do you want to achieve it?
• What do you need to achieve it?

Technical background and workplace

• Where do you usually work and for how long?
• How many hours do you spend in front of a computer?
• What are your favorite web resources and websites?
• What devices other than a computer do you use?

Personal quote

• Something that can be instantly identified as your catch phrase or a phrase you use most often.

Here’s an example of a persona

I think that’s it, the essentials of persona. Any feedback given will be appreciated. Cheers! :)