Persona in User Centered Design

Michael Sudirman
Moodah POS
Published in
4 min readNov 1, 2019
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To create a better software, we must be able to identify who are going to use them. These are called persona, a fictional character that represent the different types of user and category. In our moodah POS project, the application is created for business owner so that there will be better overview of financial records, as well as for cashiers that wants to provide a better visualization for their customers transactions

Persona

In our moodah POS project, we discussed that there are two personas that can represent the users. Each are of different type and will have a different point of view on using the software.

There are some aspects that we need to focus on when creating persona, such as the following:

  1. Who is the user of the product
    Knowing the specification of the target market’s would be relevant in creating a software. This includes their age, traits, background, and other data.
  2. What are the users problems
    As a product creator, we need to understand what problems the user are facing. Thus, hopefully these problems can be solved better.
  3. Users goals
    It is also important to understand the users’ goals as well, as it will help the user to fulfill their needs and ensure a good product.
  4. User behavior
    The user behavior acts as a subconscious feedback, and we can benefit from those once we fully understand their traits. These research also obtain the users’ pain points for guiding on the product development.

Creating a Persona

Here are some steps to create a persona:

  • Research

Do some research and take a closer look at the data you gathered in discovery phase. These data can be gathered via user interview, or through your stakeholder insight and competitor analysis.

  • Identify patterns

Once there are enough data, you can start analyzing them. Looking from trends from these data can help you understand that different groups of people can be represented as personas

  • Create

After analyzing the data, we can then document them as personas. Each persona will also have a background profile, responsibilities, pain points, and motivation to visualize the needs of these individuals.

Here are the examples of persona for moodah POS:

Yono Persona

Mr Yono will be the persona who demands POS software to expand business growth and financial overview. As shown in the figure above, he wants to have digital expansion and better performance.

Siska Sari Persona

Siska is the persona who will use the POS software to ease her work. With having the software, she will have a better way of making transactions with the customers.

User Centered Design

With having the personas developed, we can check out Figma mock up to see how our design relates with these fictional characters’ demands

  • Transaction details
    With these details being visualized better through our software, we can guide the cashier and customer by providing important payment details that they might have missed. In addition, the price tag and automatic calculations also help the cashier to provide faster transactions
Payment details
  • Receipt
    Creating a receipt digitally also allows the business to store the receipt better and provide a better financial records for both cashier and business owner
  • Checking net sales
    This feature helps business owner in checking the performance of their business, thus creating better evaluation on creating decisions for the business’ future.

Getting Persona(l) yet?

After developing these personas and having user centered design, we can create “a software for the people”. Thus, this design can be a form of feed backs and prediction on what our software will operates.

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