User Centered Design
a digest of our personas in Moodah POS
Moodah POS is one module of an ERP application called Moodah which aims to ease and increase efficiency of transactions, provide connected inventory management and better analytics.
The key to developing a product is for it to be used by users. Hence the application should be built based on them. A way to ensure this is by doing research on users and categorize them to fictional characters to represent the different types of user that will use the product called personas.
Answers to get from Personas
The team should at least get these out from the trouble of thinking of personas.
- give stakeholders opportunity to discuss features of redesign
this will be useful when there are multiple ideas from multiple stakeholders, using personas may clarify user priorities and make stakeholder prioritize them over their own personal wish. - help team members share consistent understanding of user group
detailed, good-looking document of personas make development team remember it easier - help hipster develop informed wire frames and mock ups
since personas focus on the needs of user, optimal placement of content can be made by considering the users - create more empathy and understanding about person using product
this prevents development team from applying their own mental module to design where it may differ from the actual users need
Creating Engaging Personas
As a start, do research to collect as much knowledge and data about the users, this can be done by interview of users of similar application. Then explore differences between users and group them into categories.
The team will need to decide the number of personas then proceed to describe each of them in detail to get a sense of their background, pain points and motivation to switch to or start using our product.
After that, prepare situations for your personas that could trigger the desire to use our product. This could point out the pain points and motivation of said personas. Note that as many team members as possible should participate in this process for everyone to be on the same page.
Our Personas
In Moodah POS, we decided on 2 personas, namely conventional business owner as well as cashiers. Both of them will have different use case and perspective on using the POS software which will be touched upon below.
This is a persona who will make the call to switch to using POS software for business gains. They want to increase rate of transaction and have better data of the business.
This is the other persona that will have to use the application. However, by doing so, it also relieve problems of manual written work to an integrated seamless system.
User Centered Design
Next, we are going to glance through two sections of our mock up to illustrate the notion of user centered design.
Below is the screen of cashier’s dashboard to carry out transaction, it is laid out such that cashier can easily browse through products and find brief description of each. In addition on the right, the plus, minus and cross icons allow fast order amount manipulation for speed of transaction.
Up next is a report after a session is closed, this will be useful if we consider it from the perceptive of business owner to get an idea of business performance.
To wrap it up, personas and the idea of user centered design on development is key to creating products that real users will use. Hopefully, this digest of our personas in Moodah POS aids your understanding about importance of personas. Cheers~
