Nothing Personal

A persona is an imaginary friend that we create in the beginning of a development cycle. It’s purpose is to help us developer better understand our target demographic. Persona represent the user that will use our products in the future. It also helps us better understand their needs, experience, and goals. There can be multiple persona for a product if required.

How to

In general here are the steps to create a persona:

1. Research. To create a good persona, wee need to have the same goal with the PO, we need to cover our basis together. After we create a goal, now we can start working on the persona. Do anything that can help gather data such as interview and survey.
2. Experiment. Create multiple persona prototype to be presented. Pick the best prototype or combine the good part of each prototype. This can further help designing a good persona.
3. Discuss. Once we have the persona for each demographic, present it to the rest of the group, this can help us understand from a different point of view. Then we can step up and present it to our PO, this way, we can eliminate some misunderstanding that arises from the start.
4. Get creative. Start making a scenario for the persona. This way, we can simulate what each of the audience are going to do, and help developer figure out the correct flow of a features.
5. Start. Now we can start the development of our product.

The persona

In this project, we have three persona, an owner, a student, and a CSR. Each of them cover different type of demographic and group their behavior together.

How we do it

1. Data collection, we discuss the goal with UKM’s PO, and then do some interview and also create some survey.
2. Create a template/prototype persona to discuss with the rest of the group and the scrum master.
3. We incrementally revise our persona to fit the final goals.
4. Get with PO and scrum master to decide whether the persona is finish or not, if yes, congrats.

Here are the personas that we came up with.

A business owner persona, he want to expand his business but don’t know how. He is confused about a lot of things and in need of help.

A student as a representative of young generation that in the future, want to create a business. They want to plan their future and learn on how to create a business.

An experienced business person and an investor. He is looking for a small business to invest to.

Now now

As one of the hacker in this project, persona has helped me multiple times. Sometimes, I found myself confused on how to design a flow for the user and what are the requirements for them. With the help of persona, I can understand better the user needs and design a better products from the beginning of each cycle.

Thanks for reading.