Stop making persona, Start making “Story-Matrix”
It’s likely you’ve heard the term persona before, especially if you’ve worked in user experience design. Personas are a commonly used tool in UX design. At their core, personas are about creating products with a specific, not generic, user in mind.
A persona includes behaviour patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, frustrations and background information (gender, age, location, marital status, family), as well as the environment in which a persona operates. Designers usually add a few fictional personal details in a description (e.g. a quote or slogan that captures the personality) to make the persona a realistic character.
This is how a typical persona looks —
Personas help designers to create understanding and empathy with the end users.
- Gain a perspective similar to the user’s. Creating personas can help designers step out of themselves and recognize that different people have different needs and expectations. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to infer what a real person might need.
- Identify with the user they are designing for. The more designers engage with the persona and see them as ‘real,’ the more likely they will be to consider them during the design process and want to create the best product for them.
But is a single persona sufficient to help you gain your user’s perspective or consider at every step of your design process?
Designing with Story-Matrix
A story-matrix is a set of journey points in a domain within which a product interacts with the life of a user. It starts from the point where user first feels the need of using the product till the point after the user have successfully completed the desired action using the product.
All the features you plan to implement, all the problems you tend to solve, all the solutions you give always lie within this domain.
Lets understand this with a few examples
Story matrix for MomentsApp — a private photo sharing application
With a phone at everyone’s fingertips, it’s easy to capture photos of just about every moment in our lives. But it’s cumbersome to collect all the photos different people take in one place. It’s also hard to be sure you’ll get all the photos friends take of you.
Moments makes it really fast for friends to exchange photos.
For the journey of a typical moment’s app user, the story matrix looks like —
Now lets see how the product features lie in this domain.
Story matrix for Foodpanda App — a food delivery application
Story matrix for Healofy App — a parenting and pregnancy application
I have been using this technique since almost an year now. It really helped me in getting a deeper understanding of the product and the users.
Let me know what you think about it. Also, Please let me know by commenting here if you use it in your design process, I would be glad.
Cheers!
Psst! I love helping early stage startups to convert their awesome ideas to meaningful prototypes. I also do freelance and side projects. You can find me tweetin’ at aayush_jain28 .
If you liked this, you can have a look at my other projects here.
Thanks!
