User Personas
You might often hear people saying that they have a good understanding of their users, but are confused because they can’t seem to agree on what their product should do. Perhaps they have received an influx of feature requests, and need to decide which to adopt and which to reject.
To understand at least the fundamental characteristics and needs of your customer and make better design decisions, creating personas is often a very helpful process.
When doing some research in this area I noticed that while many people are speaking about the importance of personas nobody is really breaking this down well enough to offer a real guide to this methodology.
I decided to fill the gap writing about personas not just in theory, but as a step by step guide that someone can follow to successfully use this important but often misused tool.
Let’s take as an example to base this article around:
Project: A website for booking flights.
There are generally several stages involved with creating personas.
Preparing for data collection
Firstly, there needs to be some interviews and questionnaires to research the audience and learn more about the topics of interest.
In the beginning of this project, the design team will be studying the ethnographic, demographic and psychological features of the users, making use of the technique we call ‘creating personas’. Personas should be able to answer three basic questions.
- Who will use the product?
- Will their needs and behaviours differ?
- What behaviours and environments need to be considered?
Once the research is analysed, between three and six personas are generated as a representative of the characteristics identified in people who participated in the interviews.
Personas are created as a summary of the data that emerges from the research phase. They reflect the typical users of the system, but they do not determine an average or attempt to explain every possible user of the system. For example, you may wish to develop personas around someone booking flights for a city break, a business traveller, someone booking flights for their family, and perhaps a round-the-world traveller.
We do not use averages when creating personas, as it may lead to misleading results which are different from what is actually happening.
For example, if one of your users has an income of £100,000 per year and the other one of £5000 that means that the average between those two users is £52,500 but their lifestyle is dramatically different. Creating a persona with a £52,500 income would not be representative — we would want to create a persona for the £100,000 income user and another for the £5,000 income user to learn about their needs, behaviours and expectations of the service.
Deciding what to ask
The first step for the team is to decide on the questions that should be asked in interviews. The questions we might ask could include:
- Age
- Technical competency
- Frequency of flying
- Reason for flying
- What is important to them when booking flights
Ideally there would be around 20 different variables which are relevant to the product or service. Less than this can result in an incomplete profile, focusing on areas which are not representative or relevant.
The most important aspects to emerge from such surveys are the goals and motivations of the individuals, which will give a different character to each persona.
Analysis
Next, the team categorises the respondents related to the questions answered.
For example users 1,2 and 5 are booking their tickets via the internet because it is faster than going to a travel agent or using the phone. Users 3,4 and 7 are booking tickets online because they don’t have a travel agent close to their house. If two or more people appear to have the same answers in more than 1/3 of the total they start to represent a sample.
The team repeats the procedure for a possible second sample but with a different character than the first one. The most common result here is to locate just one or two samples.
Developing proto-personas
This first proto-persona reflects the key features answered by the majority of respondents in a similar fashion. For this reason is very important to notice how well the needs of that persona are met. Generally it is easiest to start with the persona that covers the widest audience, and move toward the more complex, less frequently occurring personas.
For the proto-persona, there are between three to four goals that they needs to succeed. Those goals no matter which the project is are separated into three basic categories
- Primary human goals (e.g. health, security)
- Secondary goals. Those are the goals that can be succeeded by the use of another product. For example the use of an app which reminds to the user that he has to book his tickets. For the designer to understand which are those goals of the user all he can do is ask “why” again and again getting deeper to the acts of the user.
- The goals of experience. For each persona, those are described how the user wants to feel while using the product.
Moving to the next stage, the design team has to define the general image of the persona. Behaviour, skill, capabilities and experience, feelings, attitude and aspirations, expectations and the general environment and demographics variables are all aspects that might be relevant to define for each persona.
Personas are an archetype of the real user, and as such, they have names, jobs, family and friends, hobbies and interests, issues to be resolved and they even have a face. It’s generally recommended to avoid using names of celebrities or real people, to avoid confusion!
The last stage of the procedure is the narrative technique which will be used to explain the newly created personas. It is important to pay attention only to the important aspects that are relevant to the project, and find a way that will ensure the personas are memorable, and identifiable. Sometimes a photo of the persona, the basic characteristics and a summary is enough.
In conclusion, the biggest advantage of creating personas as a design tool is the ability to focus attention on the ‘real people’ when decisions are being made, or there is a difference of opinion on the direction a company should take with features, services or products. On the other hand, the use of personas can present a challenge. It is important to choose a suitably representative sample to ensure that the correct samples are being personified, without leaving out or alienating groups of customers.
Remember that there are many tools to categories results from your research and data but only personas can engage the part of our mind to that think in human terms.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by 289,682+ people.
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