User-Centered Design — Persona

Hello everyone, in this blog post, I would like to share with you my understanding of User-Centered Design and Persona. Also, I would like to share with you how my team and I implemented it in our software engineering project.

What is User-Centered Design?

User-Centered Design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. This means that design teams involve users throughout the design process through a variety of design techniques and research, to create highly accessible and usable products for them.

User-centered design (UCD) is an optimistic approach to invent new solutions. It starts with human beings and ends with the answers that are custom-tailored to their own individual needs. It is about understanding the people that designers are trying to reach and design from their perspective. It is all about building a deep empathy with the individuals that designers are designing for.

The Iterative Process of User-Centered Design (UCD)

To develop an understanding of user needs, designers use a mixture of investigative methods and tools (such as surveys and interviews) and generative methods and tools (such as brainstorming).

There are four distinct phases in each iteration of User-Centered Design:

1. Try to understand the context in which users may use the system: Identify the people who will use the product, what they will use it for, and under what conditions they will use it.
2. Identify and specify the user’s requirements: Identify any business requirements or user goals that must be met for the product to be successful.
3. Develop design solutions: This part of the process may be done in stages, building from a rough concept to a complete design.
4. Evaluate and assess the outcomes of the evaluation against the user’s context and requirements: Ideally through usability testing with actual users.

User-Centered Design Principles

There are 5 major User-Centered Design (UCD) Principles:

1. A clear understanding of user and task requirements.
2. Incorporating user feedback to define requirements and design.
3. Early and active involvement of the user to evaluate the design of the product.
4. Integrating user-centered design with other development activities.
5. Iterative design process.

In essence, it is actually quite simple. User-Centered Design (UCD) makes sure that designers design and develop products right from the beginning, exactly what their user want.

The Essential Elements of User-Centered Design

There are four essential elements of User-Centered Design:

• Accessibility: Users should be able to find information easily and quickly. They should be offered various ways to find information. For example, call to action buttons, search options, menu, and others.
• Language: Short sentences are preferred than longer sentences. The easier the phrase and the words, the better.
• Legibility: Text should be easy to read.
• Visibility: Users should be able to see from the beginning what they can do with the product, what is it about, how they can use it.

Persona in User-Centered Design

What is Persona?

A Persona is a fictional character yet realistic representations of your target users, which designers create based on their research in order to represent the different user types that might use their brand, product, service, or website in a similar way. It acts as a multipurpose tool used to drive many important product development tasks such as the creation of user scenarios, feature generation, and feature prioritization. It is created out of complex user data and it takes on a format that is meaningful. It also creates user empathy among the development team, ensuring the users are always the main focus of the team’s efforts.

Creating personas can help designers to understand their users’ behaviours, experiences, goals and needs. It can also help designers to recognise that people have different needs and expectations. Personas can make the design task less complex, guide the ideation processes, and help the designers to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for their target user group.

10 Steps to Create a User Persona

1. Collect data: Collect data about the users as much as possible. Perform high-quality user research of actual users in the team’s target user group.
2. Form a hypothesis: Form a general idea of the various users within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one another . The designers can use Affinity Diagrams and Empathy Maps.
3. Everyone accepts the hypothesis: Support or reject the first hypothesis about the differences between the users. The designer can do this by confronting project participants with the hypothesis and comparing it to existing knowledge.
4. Establish a number: Decide upon the final number of personas.
5. Describe the personas: Describe personas in such a way that express enough understanding and empathy to understand the users.
6. Prepare situations or scenarios for your personas: Describe a number of specific situations that could trigger the use of the product or service the designers are designing.
7. Obtain acceptance from the organisation: Ask the participants for their opinion, or let them participate actively in the process.
8. Disseminate knowledge: The dissemination of knowledge also includes how the project participants will be given access to the underlying data.
9. Everyone prepares scenarios: Prepare scenarios for the personas.
10. Make ongoing adjustments: Revise the descriptions on a regular basis. New information and new aspects may affect the descriptions.

Attributes and Stakeholders of the Personas

Persona 1

Persona 2

The two pictures above are our two current personas that we created at the beginning of the Software Engineering Project course. The name of the two personas is Yono, which is the Conventional Business Owner and Yono2, which is the cashier. They are our target users. Yono is a 53 years old conventional business owner, who has a degree in Business and owns a restaurant for over 20 years. Yono2 is a 24 years old man who has an experience in working as a cashier in a restaurant.

The stakeholders that are involved in our application business process are the product owner and project team members.

How My Team and I Implement the Personas

My team and I implement the personas by firstly, obtaining much knowledge needed about our target users. Second, we formed a hypothesis based on our initial research. We formed a general idea of the various users and how they are different from one another. Then, we asked everyone in the project team members and the product owner to support or reject the first hypothesis about the differences between the users. After that, we decide upon the final number of personas. We decided that we are going to use two personas for sprint 1. Lastly, we describe the personas in such a way as to express enough understanding and empathy to understand the users (their goals, needs, and others).

Here is the picture of the first persona:

Persona 1.1

Persona 1.2

Here is the picture of the second persona:

Persona 2

Conclusion

In my opinion, I think User-Centered Design (UCD) is important because using User-Centered Design (UCD) can greatly save time and effort in designing for a project.

Thank you for reading :)