Per·so·na
(/ˌpərˈsōnə/)
On the next episode of “What is this college student doing with his time”, we are going to talk about Persona. To inexperienced ears, it might mean an aspect of someone involving their character, or they might also think it’s short for “personality”. Some people might associate this word with a role-playing video game franchise where people do drastic measures to summon hellish monsters. Today we are talking about none of those, as the Persona we’re gonna be talking about is the one used in user-centered designs.
Persona
the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others
Parallel to its meaning, the term used in user-centric design has a very similar meaning to its meaning in-dictionary. Personas are fictional characters that we as designers create to represent a type of user that will be the target demographic of our website, brand, app, or product. The point of making them is so designers (in this case, us), get to make an estimation of what our target audience would be like, what they like to do, why they would use our product, and how we could make them use our product.
While they may be fictional, they could be based off of real people or a collection of similar minded people, so our goal when creating personas is to create the representation as close to reality as possible (this can be backed by research, observation, etc). While we can “guess” the persona without researching beforehand, inaccurate description and representation might result in our product not being perceived well by our actual demographic, completely the opposite of what we desire.
How To Create A Persona
Step 1: Research About Your Users
Conducting user research to determine your target market is good civilization. Without valid data, you would definitely be overwhelmed when trying to create a persona, let alone multiple personas. It’s good to know what the current market asks for and desires, because the market is ever-changing, and people easily bore themselves of the current trends. This includes design and flows.
Even if you’re not trying to rappel new consumers for your products, doing user research for loyal users shouldn’t be shunned upon, as usually users who have used your products for some time, know of what should be improved and renewed.
Step 2: Identify Behavioral Patterns
Now that we have the relevant data we need, we can analyze it, and group accordingly. We need to find a pattern from each user that correlates with other users, and thus, group all of them into different demographics. We can group by age, identify traits, or group them by their respective goals, until we have enough groups to represent all of our target market.
Step 3: Create!
There are five main elements that are needed when creating personas, Photo, Name, Description, Users, and Problems.
People associate with a person better when there’s a Photo. Without a photo, most people wouldn’t feel represented. Which is why it’s good to have diverse profiles.
Without a Name next to a photo, the identity of the persona would be missing. A fake name should also be avoided, as people would feel like they’re looking at a cartoon character, or a movie character when they see a clearly made up fake name.
Description is imported to give each persona a background. What they’ve been doing all their lives, what they like or dislike, what their aspirations are. Short descriptions wouldn’t provide much, and longer descriptions would ramble on for too long, so a description is best kept between 100–200 words.
Problems, or should we say Pain Points, are the main point we’re trying to take. Define the problems each persona is suffering from. Therefore, we can devise a solution to satisfy those pain points.
Step 4: Share It! (Get Feedback)
Now that we have finished creating our personas, it is very wise to show your work to your team members. That way, you can get inputs from various point of views in your team, and get feedback on how you can improve each persona. Failure to show someone else your work is bad civilization, as you would only have one point of view on your work: yourself, and people tend to see their works in vanity. By opening up your heart, and brace yourself for criticism, you will finally learn of what it means to be a team player.
Persona Implementation
So you might be thinking, “This kid’s been blabbering about personas for a few minutes, but does he even know how to create personas?”
No, I do not.
What up? I’m Vadim, I’m 19, and I never learned how to make personas.
Just kidding.
I wouldn’t have passed my Web Development Course if don’t know how to make personas.
UKM Owner
UKM Owners are micro-small business owners who work on their businesses most of the time. As it is the owner, they sometimes have some partners/employees who help them care for their business.
There are a lot of types of micro-small businesses. It can range from culinary, transportation, even selling recycled things. UKM Owners are very diverse, therefore, we create a Persona that could represent each sub-group of UKM Owners.
Student
The Student Persona are students who are interested in making their own business. They usually want to start small, so they are interested in starting small from micro-small level. More and more of the younger generations are interested in becoming their own boss, instead of working for someone else and becoming a worker. They usually don’t know how the licensing for UKMs work and are usually clueless when building their businesses. So it’s easier to group students together. Usually aged between 18–30.
CSR
CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility is how companies manage their business processes to produce an overall positive impact on society. They play a huge role on UKMs as they usually scout promising UKMs and train them so they can expand their businesses (Ex : UKM Owners who recycle trash into bags are given extensive training arranged by CSRs. Once one of the UKM Owners show potential at becoming a mentor, they’re hired by the CSRs to teach other UKM Owners using the knowledge they gained while in training with CSRs).
CSRs usually try to scout promising UKM Owners through various methods. By introducing them to UKMIndonesia.id, they would have an easier way to scout UKM Owners.
Afterwords
That’s basically all you need to know about personas and how to create one. Easy, right? Even if you’ve researched and interviewed 1000 people, it’s not impossible that at the end, you’re left with 5 personas. You should also take care not to spend all your time and energy on one step, as it needs an equal balance.
Auf Wiedersehen~
