Personas are about building your user from the ground up based upon gathered insights. Creating a strong persona can help you shape your product and achieve design solutions. So what are you waiting for? Let’s dive deep into personas! →
Predict what will happen 🧐
There are a couple of ways when creating personas. We start off with defining the users and the needs. We can do this through user research — where data is gathered to eliminate assumptions. Some tactics of gathering research can be by conducting user interviews, observing and surveys. This will set the foundations for the goal we’re trying to achieve.
Then develop a hypothesis from the insights. Discover roughly how many personas need to be developed you can categorise these by roles or demographic, situational, geographic and psychgraphic segmentation.
Example: Demographic segmentation
Selling yoga active wear online
• People who have internet access
• Focusing on a younger audience
• Age group of 18–30 years
• Mainly female target market
Tip: Getting the clients on board at an early stage is healthy for the team to understand exactly who you’re targeting.
Let’s empathise 💕
Empathy is a crucial element to creating personas. Gather insights on cultural backgrounds, frustations, goals, lifesyle, desires and behaviours keep in the context with your underlying problem.
Including extra details such as interests, makes personas come to life and enables everyone to visualise the user.
UX is about what users really experience, not what you think they will experience.
Example:
Sarah is a 25 busy-bee who is working as a hospital nurse.
The challenges she faces is that she is too busy to go do her shopping physically since she has 2 young children at home to take care of.
Her goals are to balance work and home life, be able to spend more time with her kids. Also, have time to relax and unwind with some ‘me’ and family time.
She really enjoys catching up with friends on the weekend, she wishes there was a way to do all her weekly shop in one go so she saves money and time to do the things she and kids want.
In their shoes 👟
The fun part! This is where groups/roles come into play. Naming and describing the persons motivations, attitudes, frustrations and goals.
When it comes to making the persona we need to see it from their perspective. This will help envision how your users will use your product and understand their goals. Make sure the personas are well-balanced between the data insights and fictional information that induce empathy.
Are they an introvert? How are their IT skills? What are their frustrations with using the product or service?
Use the research to mould their personality and attributes. The more detail you add and a biography to the persona, the team can visualise the user and their goals.
Tip: Sliding a quote in from previous user interviews will leverage your persona to become personable.
Say when? 📲
Personas come into play quite early on in the discovery stages of laying the foundations of your user experience journey. Improving your project is essential, so is iterating on your personas throughout the project lifecycle.
Present your personas with the team and clients throughout the entire journey to make sure they’re on board. Add in new components to the personas, that could be improvements and new features to the product to keep them up to date when they need to be referred back to.
Designing products and services are to help users accomplish objectives and the best way to do that is to truly understand how users perform certain tasks,think and feel.
