What are and How to Create Users Personas: A Short Guideline
Great apps can be made when the people who make it care about the people who use it. That means during every meeting, when making any decision, in every design and with every line of code, you should first be thinking about your users.
That’s why personas matters. But what are personas? Here I present to you the definition of persona from interaction-design
Personas are fictional characters designers use to reflect user types, pinpointing who they are and what they do with products in relevant contexts. Designers create personas from user data, to understand user characteristics, needs, goals, etc. and gain valuable insights into user journeys, and later, test prototypes.
In short, a persona is a heavily researched representation of a type of user. If we make an app, then the success of our app is defined by how the users could benefit from the app. That’s why creating a persona is so important.
Note that it’s important to conduct plenty of research to make sure your personas accurately represent your users. Then, organize the information into persona groups that represent your ideal customers. Remember that you can’t be everyone at once so it’s very important to get the right needs on your personas.
What should we put in a persona
From what I know, there is no restriction for the things we need to put into our persona. But, a good persona should have the following:
- Name
Name is very powerful. Name ensure that your persona is memorable, keeping the design team focused on who they are designing for. A persona should not have real people name because it can cause some bias. - Personal Background
The personal background includes details such as age, gender, ethnicity, education, persona group (e.g. working moms), and family status (e.g. single, married with children, widowed, etc.). - Professional Background
The professional background includes details such as job occupation, income level, and work experience. - User Environment
The user environment represents the physical, social, and technological context of the user. This feature answer the following question:
- What technological devices do users have access to?
- What platform?
- Do they spend most of their time in a corporate office or a home office
- How often do they collaborate with others?
- Are they often works alone?
- Etc. - Psychographics
Psychographics include details such as attitudes, interests, motivations, and pain points. Creating a psychographic profile enables you to better understand why your user behaves in a certain way — including why they use your product. The example is a millennial tends to favour quality over the economy than a boomer.
Persona in making
To make things easier to understand. I have a real case on how persona is made. Right now, my team are building an application for lawyers to answer the questions from anonymous clients about the law. We need to think about the different type of lawyers that will use our app.
Because our user must be lawyers, my team decided to make a persona start from their age. Why age? As we know, a person in their 20s will be used to technology than someone older than 40.
Our first persona, khalid murfis is 28 years old lawyer. He is used to technology and love to check his phone. Because he is a new lawyer, he still lacks the experience to answer certain law question. That’s why it's important to have features on our app that can give the question to another lawyer. He is also like to have quick access to every feature on our app. A tab-bar could come in handy for this.
Our second champion, Mrs. Olivia Sutandi. She is a married woman who is on her mid-30s. She has a little child to take care of. She needs an app that didn't take much up time from her because she is busy. That’s why we need to make sure our app can be accessed quickly on performance and design level. So it can accommodate Mrs. Olivia Sutandi that represent a busy person that don’t have much time on their phone.
Last but not least, Mr. Reinhard Hotma. He is a legendary lawyer. He has been a lawyer for more than 20 years. He can answer almost every law question. The problem is, he is 45 years old. He and technology is not exactly a best friend. He can’t use an app that is too complicated. He needs to get enough tutorial or guide on how to use the app. He also didn't use to update app on his phone. That’s why it’s important to design an app based on his persona. The example could be an onboarding or a big colourful button.
In short, there’s Khalid Murfis representing new lawyer, Olivia Sutandi representing working mom who is a slightly experienced lawyer, and Reinhard Hotma representing senior lawyers. That’s 3 personas that my team create to represent our users. The number of personas created should be 3–5. In our cases, 3 is enough. This is just an example and I think creating a persona is much more than that and it should be different for every app.
