Persona/User, who’s that we are talking about?
My understanding of what a “persona/user” is and the type of “persona/user” that is used in the industry. Take it with a grain of salt *seriously.
Often while working in a UX project, everyone will be throwing statements such as;
“We need to create a persona/user to make the product more wholesome (are we making it wholesome as what the persona/user want or making something that is good — will leave this subject for another article)”
“This is not what the persona/user need (when we are trying to save development resources or broken telephone communication happens)”
And the list goes on…
What is Persona/User?
At this point of time of this article, I understand there are 2 types being used by most.
Proto-Persona
Proto-Persona is a persona that is created using a project stakeholder’s intuition and understanding of how their product can better their supposed persona life.
Primary difference between proto-personas and true personas (Segmentation Persona) is the lack of background research when considering proto-personas. As these proto-personas are created in the absence of research as the project progresses more will be learned about the users, (either through user interviews, A&B testing, etc). Over the course of the project, the proto-personas can be updated to more accurately reflect what has been learned.
Segmentation Persona
Segmentation Persona is the practice of grouping different sets of like people (customers or potential customers) based on distinct needs and/or characteristics. Generally developed by doing large-scale research, and are defined using demographic information like age, race, or location, or psychographic and behavioral information like interests, opinions, values, lifestyle, risk aversion, or life stage.
Segments don’t provide insights into a user, but more insights about groups of users within a larger marketplace. These groups could help stakeholders and product owners differentiate between the different types of users that exist, and what those user groups might be interested in.
So who exactly determine the persona/user?
Is it the person who pays us to put food on the table?
The person who is using the product?
The answer to me is both, as in most cases and situation a product team would often only be provided with a Proto-Persona as the starting building foundation as to how the product would be built for a long period of time until research and testing could be undertaken with the MVP created. But one would need to understand that we are only testing the user receptiveness towards the product usage as compared if the product is something that challenges the norm if it’s competitive dollar to dollar against other products in the market.
Ideally if a segmentation persona is provided after it can help verify if the assumption made during the creation of the Proto-Persona is valid along make the it more robust, reducing time wasted during development of the product that seeks to only enhance the user daily workflow as compared to creating change that perhaps the user no longer would require to manually act on certain process to function as it would be irrelevant to their new process.
Summary
As what my senior lead has always tell me there is only one persona/user, similar to a coin it’s just depends on which side of the coin are you looking at is it heads or tails.
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