She Code Africa: What is a persona in design?
Dara: Good question! Before we design or develop solutions, we should always start by gaining an understanding of our users and their needs. To help us do this, we create personas which are documented representations of your intended users.
A good design process starts with research, and insights derived from these research sessions help us construct personas that reflect our users.
A bit of historical context — in 1998, the use of personas was introduced by software engineer, Alan Cooper. At the time, it was an emerging user-centered design method. Now, personas are a common practice in helping product teams better understand users, and make better decisions on their behalf.
She Code Africa: Are there different types of Personas?? If Yes, what are they?
Dara: There are different ways to construct personas and also different ways to prioritize them. I’ll share common ones (there could be more)
⚡️ Construction types —
- Goal-directed personas — focused on what the user wants to do with the product
- (ex: receive money vs. send money)
3. Role-based personas — focused on a user’s role (ex: business owner vs. customer)
🎯 Prioritization types —
After creating a set of personas, you’ll also want to prioritize them
- ⭐️ Primary personas — primary target user for your design/product
- Secondary personas — shares many of the goals and needs of the primary, but might have some additional needs that need to be accommodated
- Supplemental personas — their needs are represented by primary and secondary personas
- Negative personas — the users we won’t be building for. Knowing this helps us when communicating with our team about product and design decisions.
She Code Africa: Why is it important to understand your users?
Dara: I’ll pull a quote from one of my favorite designers. Dieter Rams is a German Industrial Designer who rose to prominence in the 1950s. He once said,
“Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”
That said, our role as people who create, is to understand people (this goes for designers, engineers, marketers, etc). You can’t build for a user you don’t understand.
The real challenge is understanding your user intimately enough that you’re able to put yourself “in their shoes” while making decisions on their behalf and creating products for them.
Understanding your users and building great products are intertwined.
She Code Africa: What are the steps in creating user personas?
Dara: At the basic level, your process could look something like this:
Step 1: Identify the opportunity — are you trying to understand users of your company as a whole, users of a particular product, feature, etc
Step 2. Research — analyze existing data, conduct user interviews, send surveys, etc (my first 3 months at Netflix, I was just doing research!)
Step 3. Aggregate insights — use research to identify common patterns and themes
Step 4. Construct personas — create an artifact (document, presentation, etc) of representations of patterns identified in the previous step.
Typical personas could include details about the user’s goals, needs, motivations, wants, limitations, attitudes, and patterns of behavior.
Next, you want to name your persona, find an image to help visualize them, and create some details about who they are (their job, age, etc)
Here’s an example of what a finished persona could look like (image from from UX Collective)
She Code Africa: As a designer how do you put personas to work in UX Design?
Dara: I lean on the personas frequently throughout my process, but especially when I’m starting to work on a new feature or product. I use the persona to help make critical decisions, when I’m thinking about workflows and interactions in my design, and when I’m trying to get alignment with my colleagues.
For instance, if I’m giving a walk through of a proposed design, I’ll typically start by sharing context about the persona (even if it’s just a summary about the user’s needs/goals, rather than the full persona) so that people can get a better understanding of the user’s perspective.
She Code Africa: What makes a good user persona?
Dara: I’ll keep this one simple, a good persona answers the following questions:
- Who are our users and what are they trying to achieve? Why?
- What behaviours, assumptions, and expectations do they have?
Some best practices that might be helpful:
- Research first, please.
- Prioritize your personas. You could probably construct dozens of personas depending on the scale of your product. The best way to successfully accommodate a variety of uses is to design for specific types of individuals with specific needs.
- Treat personas as “living documents”: meaning that you update then when you have new data, information, or feedback.
- Stay away from overly fictionalised characters and a focus on demographic information.
She Code Africa: Are Personas Effective? Why are personas so important to the design process?
Dara: User personas enable us to:
- Start the foundation of our product (we know who we’re building for and why)
- Determine if our solutions meet the goals, motivations, and needs of our users.
- Prioritize features and make quicker decisions
- Share a common language when speaking about our users (my personal favorite benefit of creating personas and sharing them widely with my team)
She Code Africa: In the process of creating user personas when doing research. What factors should I consider for my research so I can collect useful data?
Dara: Good question! It all depends on the scope of the problem you’re trying to solve.
My recommendation is that you should keep your research questions specific enough, but also unbiased (don’t communicate your assumptions). Create your research questions beforehand and review them to ensure that they’ll help you answer your most pressing questions.
My favorite ways to conduct research are through user interviews, and then I typically find themes with a practice called Affinity Clustering.
