People-driven Data
“A persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product. A persona is an archetype instead of an actual living human, but personas should be described as if they were real people.”
Personas are very important UX tools that can guide a project from it’s early stages, straight through development and testing. These imaginary people should feel as tangible as a detailed Facebook profile, while containing relevant information on how this person would view the proposed product. While this may sound like a lot of work, proper execution leads to products that real people will care to purchase. To illustrate the process, I’m going to go through making three personas for a hypothetical collaborative music making app.
It is important to note that we will be discussing UX personas, not marketing personas. Marketing personas are used to strategize on existing customers, where as our personas aim to create empathy with a real group of product users. To start our journey through the human condition we should start as we all do, with a name. I like to pick a name first as it avoids bias while connecting any data to an easy-to-imagine source. An easy solution to get names that meet basic diversity considerations are random name generators, like this one. We’ll be using the names Linus, Seema, and Daniela!
Stepping into their Shoes
For any meaningful persona, the first objective we should have is to hammer out groups of people that face the problem we want to solve. Let’s look at our music making app and ask, what kind of person is going to use this? Off the top of my head, musicians and producers, although it’s important to not make too many assumptions. In a real world project, we would have a market analysis that would detail competition who’s user-base we could study. In this case we can look at Garageband, an intuitive and popular application in the Apple Ecosystem. So in addition to the two previous categories, we can add music students, teachers, and bands.
We can assign/combine the most relevant user types to our names. Linus is a 45 year old music professor at Boston University; Seema is the 22 year old lead singer of her band, Toxic Pixies; while Daniela is the 36 year old record label executive at Universal Music Group(UMG). Notice the formula to create your own taglines; person is a certain age and has a certain job/hobby. Keep it as simple as this, adding more would invalidate future parts of our exercise.
Now that we have a baseline for our people, going forward, we’ll want to make sure we don’t influence their personality with ideals of the product. (Ex: we want the product to be technologically advanced so we’ll say Linus has a degree in computer science, which is not a likely thing for a music professor to have.)
Think Like an Actor
“The main theme must be firmly fixed in an actor’s mind throughout the performance. It gave birth to the writing of the play. It should also be the fountain-head of the actor’s artistic creation.”
— Constantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, Pg. 273
The wants and needs of a character are a constant concern of any actor trying to embody their role. To represent anything, we must categorize it, and in our case of personas, we must discuss user expectations to define their goals. As we look at the wants and needs of Linus, Seema, and Daniela, three patterns will emerge: ‘wants’ that align with ‘needs’, ‘needs’ that triumph over ‘wants’, ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ that are unrelated. While the first and third option aren’t important right now, when a person prioritizes ‘needs’ over ‘wants’, they’re making a sacrifice. Products that fulfill these ‘wants’ are ultimately what the user will choose.
Linus, as a professor, needs his class to understand his music lectures and wants more engagement from his students. He doesn’t need tools that obsess over basic music theory, as his class is far beyond that. He does want intuitive interfaces, as he gets confused on computers quite easily. He knows his class can pick up new software tools pretty easily, but they also have individual preferences for their music making software.
Seema the artist is obsessed with new technology that will help her and her band make music. The Toxic Pixies have recently been gaining traction and are planning a nation-wide tour spanning three months. She wants to be able to make music, but has to be in a cramped tour bus for most of the day. As the vocalist, she finds it difficult to record without all the instrumentals already recorded.
Daniela has noticed a decline in collaborations since she started at UMG as an intern 17 years ago. Now that she’s recently been promoted to executive, she wants to shake up the system with some fresh ideas. The main problem she notices is that artists don’t want to collaborate without knowing their royalties and signing contracts, making the practice scarce. Since she can get the paperwork done very easily, she wants a way to streamline the amount of collaborations coming into the record label.
Filling In the Blanks
Now that we have a general outline of our three people, we need to discover brands affect them, as well as scope their technical level of expertise. This will help define any pain-points the product should avoid. It’s helpful to pick ubiquitous brands so anyone utilizing your persona will automatically understand what’s trying to be conveyed.
It’s easy to see Linus will have a tough time using modern technology. He isn’t accustom to touch interfaces, and hardly ever uses his phone. He likes reliable, old-fashioned brands that have been around since before he was born, such as: Ford, GE, and IBM. Acquiring a user like this will require a professional, solid brand presence.
Seema is in a youthful demographic that are usually on their phones. In contrast to Linus, Seema would find it more cumbersome to use a desktop application than a mobile app. She’s a fan of Apple, Spotify, and Instagram, mostly companies that target modern minimalist trends. This type of user is a much easier acquisition, using niche marketing to suss out young artists.
Daniela is quite capable with a computer, however a product that solely makes music would be of litter interest to her. She would be interested in a service that listed different art collaborations in a convenient way for her to find upcoming talent. Her favorite music brands are discovery services like Pandora and iHeart Radio, while most of her shopping takes place on Amazon, for the convenience.
Get a Good Look at Them
A picture of the person is a must for any persona trying to create developer engagement. When picking a picture to represent a persona I try to get a stock photo of a ‘plain’ person. Profiles that are too glamorous or grungy will distract from the content of the persona. While not necessary, I like to get photos that show people doing the job we assigned them in the “Stepping into their Shoes” section, for further humanization.
Time for Some Psychology
We can use a modified version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test to fully round out our personas. This version of the personality test uses five categories instead of four; however, it isn’t considered science due to the generalization of personality into ‘types’. While this theory in cognitive psychology is controversial, the dichotomies will help us to fully understand our subject’s minds. Let’s quickly list out the juxtapositions so we can apply them to our personas! Introverted vs. Extroverted: How social is this person? Observant vs. Intuitive: Is this person practical or open minded? Thinking vs. Feeling: How logical/emotional are they? Judging vs. Prospecting: A measure of their flexibility in novel situations. And finally, Assertive vs. Turbulent: How self-assured are they? By measuring these values on a scale, we can get a more accurate picture of how a persona will act.
Linus would lean towards IOFJ-T, displaying qualities of introversion, practicality, emotion, rigidity, and self-consciousness. His role as a professor allows him to conform to society while shaping young minds. Even so, his love of music allows him freedom to express his feelings.
Seema could represent EIFP-T, expressing traits of extroversion, open-mindedness, and emotional range in her performance lifestyle, while being adaptable to the constantly changing music industry landscape. While Seema is a trade performer, she often struggles with the confidence to express her artistic ideas in a large group.
Daniela fits the mold of a EOTP-A, as an extroverted, practical, and logical executive, however she is adaptable from her years of corporate experience and knows how to assert herself in any given situation.
Let’s Present Our People!
Now that we’ve gathered all the data we need, it needs to be summarized and reported in an organized and beautified document. Without further adieu, here are the personas we made!
