Personas — hit or miss?
Personas are simultaneously hit or miss for a design process. In the majority of UX introduction workshops, you have an amazing chance to create your first persona. You can improve your empathy and analysis of a target group.
When I was mentoring younger colleagues, I noticed that usually, this topic is taught without critical commentary. We can get to know a lot of buzzword stuff about data-driven development and personas as a must-have for all projects. Sometimes it is not enough when you get to a real team with a real, commercial task. Many young designers know how to create personas, but they don’t know how to get value from them.
Know-how
First thing — proto-personas
I won’t explain what it is. :) Here’s a link to take a look. TL;DR: Be careful what you assume and what is based on quantitative or qualitative data.
Only things that matter
It seems to me that this is the main problem to comment on. In first in career case studies, often you can find extensive and beautiful personas. You can google complex templates for them. They are ok, but usually, they are dedicated more to other fields like marketing, sales or advertising. For UX design, ask yourself what data can have a real impact on your product. Your answer will be different depending on the type, goal, and stage of the project.
Let me give you an example.
We have an electronic shop, and we want to analyze and improve a checkout. It is your first meeting with this product, so you need to know for whom you are going to optimize a user interface. You create John Example based on analytics and interview data. He has two dogs, he likes spending free time with friends, and he is tired of working in a corporate environment. A lot of info can have an impact on new features ideas, marketing or sales. And it doesn’t have any on details on a user interface, on where you put a button or how to make easier an invoice form.
If you are creating personas, think about what things matter. What kind of characteristics, demographics, lifestyle info, etc. can be valuable? There is nothing bad about preparing detailed descriptions of a target group. Ask yourself: ‘Do I need it? Does it worth to spend so much time on that?’. Will you use it during the following stages of a project? Is it an exploratory stage? Or will you share it with people from other departments, like mentioned marketing?
It can mean nothing for the shape of a button and at the same time, give us a shot to thinking about a new easier way to order dog food. If you have real data, it is easier to filter them for specific cases. Ask yourself, what information about the potential target group is relevant to a problem.
Keep it short
So if you can say something in 30 words instead of 150, do it. Avoid long descriptions of behavior if it doesn’t add anything important to the context. Your team will read it, respect their time.
If you did them, use them
Did you create personas at the kick-off of a project? Next time did you see it when you are preparing a case study for a portfolio? Oh no! Don’t leave them in a forgotten Google Doc! Update and use it for the next steps, like, e.g. user stories, journey mapping, presenting flows and wireframes, make a screener for usability testing. When you work for a product team, you can update them based on changing trends. Add new data and discuss it with a team.
Consider other methods
For every project and every specialist, different methods can work better. If you don’t see sense in creating personas, if you don’t feel that, it’s OK. Instead of personas, you can use empathy mapping, user stories, plain description, infographics. It works both for research findings and concepts.
Whenever I’m mapping the audience for a product, I try to think about what information is relevant, how many personas can I have, how am I going to use it, e.g. during workshops or as a summary of a research. I am listing them in a short brainstorm and then decide which method will be the best and the fastest.
You can have ten completely different types of who can be your target, but all of them have the same tasks to do and similar pain points. Then it can be more useful to handle it with, e.g. user stories approach and it speeds up the process of defining MVP.
When do they work very well?
Personas as actors
In contrast, I found personas super useful for processes with completely different actors. Usually, they have different goals and pain points. They use a product on different stages. It is very easy to divide them into single, separated characters in a story. In this case, personas are clear and work perfectly.
Workshop tool
Another thing is working with a team or client without a deeper understanding of what is UX design. You can use personas as one of a workshop tool. You can engage a team and make them think about the real problems of customers. It is a good workshop tool because participants don’t have to be UX experts to start creating them. The learning curve is very attractive.
Communication strategy
Personas are used not only for user experience design. As I have mentioned before, they are helpful for sales or communication strategy. It’s very important to who you are talking to. Personas can help create a type of language used, advertising or even a brand hero.
Personas sell themselves
Personas are a nice way to present it to clients or stakeholders. It is visualized, humanized, fancy, easy to do and understand. It works both for presenting assumptions, summarize complex data.
Have a nice day! 👋
Have you found persons very useful for any not mentioned case? Feel free to comment! :)
