Persona: How To Describe User Characteristics
Introduction
Design is one of many ways to communicate with users in an intriguing approach. Its visual approach is meant to attract a user to comfortably use the product. Most of the time, the design process gives an output of what people nowadays call “satisfying”. In reality, people in common are not able to define what is called good design. More precisely, people don’t understand how to create a design approach to a specific type of people. Hence, the persona comes in hand.
Definition
Persona is an imaginary user representation that comprises a summary of the characteristics, experiences, goals, tasks, pain points, and the environment of the user. It is made according to a comprehensive analysis and categorization of users so that the designers are able to focus on a certain group of people with the same characteristics.
Usage
In a system design, a persona is optimally utilized if solves three issues in interaction design: (1) Elastic user: imprecise knowledge of user characteristics implies uncertainty on how a product should work. (2) Self-referential design: designers use their own perspective, goals, motivation, and skills in the design process. (3) Edge cases: a certain feature is never used as it doesn’t match the user needs.
Implementation
A general implementation in persona design consists of five steps: (1) User research: observe user characteristics through interview and literature review. (2) Research specification: decide a specific, relevant, and universal prior to the system and its users. (3) Brainstorming: group elements to more specific persona groups. (4) Refine: combine and decide the priority of each persona. (5) Persona realization: add user background, motivation, and expectations. (6) Persona presentation: share the person to the development team.
This is the end of my blog with the topic persona. I am open to suggestions in this story’s comment section. Cheers!
Reference
System Interaction Course Module on Persona Topic
