PPL 2020 — Document Builder: Understanding User Persona

This post is written as a part of individual review criteria of Fasilkom UI’s software engineering project course: PPL 2020

Have you ever developed a software just for the sake of developing it? For me, yes. Many times.

As a computer science student, it is mostly easy for us to find the time and resources to create a software that no one will end up using. We explore things, we try to gain experience by churning out code through trial and error, we don’t really care whether anyone will actually use our software or not.

As we grow professionally as an individual and gain more industry experience, we realize that creating software is more than just churning out code. In Fasilkom UI’s software engineering project course, we create software for real clients thus will be used for making a real impact. The software that we create will even impact the business processes and workflow of our clients.

We create software for real clients and will be used by real people. We can’t just design the software the way we want it to be and jump right into code. This is where user persona comes into the picture. In this post, I will try to explore and increase my own and the readers’ understanding of what user persona is and how it can help the development team throughout the product development cycle.

What is User Persona?

According to an article by Clevertap, a user persona is a semi-fictitious representation of our users. It can help us the development team, to know the inside of our user’s mind and make product decisions based on users’ needs.

I will try to illustrate how a user persona should look like in the product that we created through this software engineering project course, Document Builder.

Name: Mia Larasati

Age: 24

Gender: Female

Educational background: High School Diploma

Job: Secretariat Administrator at Faculty of Law, University of Indonesia (FHUI)

Brief bio: Mia is one of the administrators in FHUI’s secretariat. She is responsible to collect requests of official letters (eg: scholarship recommendation letter, official transcript) from students and faculty members and issue them every day.

Wants and Needs: Needs to issue hundreds of official letter requests from students of FHUI every day. Wants a system that is able to ease the processes that she needs to go through daily at her job.

Through this sample user persona, we can see that one of the “fictitious” users of the software that we make needs a system that can help her do her job. The user persona doesn’t mention about any technology or automation that she needs from the system.

This becomes important when we are faced with both the software requirement from our clients and the actual needs of our potential user. Composing a good user persona (one that is also backed by user research) would prevent us from building something that looks good for the development team but renders useless for the users. Imagine what happens if we build a fully automated software engineered with machine learning in mind but it confuses the end user and they don’t end up using the things we build?

Through this exploration of what user persona really is, I find some advantages that user persona can contribute to the development of software:

1. It gives insight to users’ motivations, goals, and needs
2. It justifies/denies complex software requirements before the development cycle begins. When it is complex but is needed by users, we build it. If it is complex and the users don’t need it, we discard it.
3. It helps the development team design and develop user-centered software.

Writing this article definitely helps me understand the importance of user personas a little better and I hope it helps you too. Feel free to ask any questions or give any feedback for improvement in the comment section below.

Thank you for reading, I hope it was useful :)