Why develop personas

The more information you have, the better. Generally, Personas whittled down from several user groups are sufficient to capture and document a majority of user requirements. Depending on your project, you may have past users or you may not.

In , Alan Cooper published his successful book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, where he, as the first person ever, described personas as a method we can use to describe fictitious users. Personas are fictional characters. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they will guide your ideation processes, and they will help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.

The step process covers the entire process from the preliminary data collection, through active use, to continued development of personas.

Nielsen , Lene, Personas. Atlanta based Photographer Jason Travis has created a series of Persona Portraits with their artifacts which illustrates the power of visually representing archetypal users, customers or personalities.

Log in Join our community Join us. Open menu Close menu. Join us. Goal-directed Personas This persona cuts straight to the nitty-gritty. Img Source 2. Role-Based Personas The role-based perspective is also goal-directed and it also focusses on behaviour. Img Source 4. Fictional Personas The fictional persona does not emerge from User Research unlike the other personas but it emerges from the experience of the UX design team.

There are four main parts: Data collection and analysis of data steps 1, 2 , Persona descriptions steps 4, 5 , Scenarios for problem analysis and idea development steps 6, 9 , Acceptance from the organisation and involvement of the design team steps 3, 7, 8, Add a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. Give each of your personas a name. Create 1—2-pages of descriptions for each persona.

Secure form. Name Please provide your name. Email We respect your privacy. Closes in. View course. Join , designers who get useful UX tips from our newsletter. A valid email address is required. Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.

Read article. Design Thinking is not an exclusive property of designers—all great innovators in literature, art, music, science, engin 1. An integral part of the Design Thinking process is the definition of a meaningful and actionable problem statement, whic 1. What does a UX designer actually produce? Here, we will explore the concept of UX Deliverables, a term that describes th 1. Ideation is the process where you generate ideas and solutions through sessions such as Sketching, Prototyping, Brainsto 1.

Stage 4 in the Design Thinking Process: Prototype. One of the best ways to gain insights in a Design Thinking process is to carry out some form of prototyping. This method 1. Stage 3 in the Design Thinking Process: Ideate. In the Ideation stage, design thinkers spark off ideas — in the form of questions and solutions — through creative and c 1. He uses his iPad to check and respond to emails on his commute. These are the emotionally driven attributes of a persona.

Motivations, attitudes, interests and importantly pain points are included here. A psychographic profile helps you to understand how and why an audience behaves a certain way.

If we imagine we were building a new event booking platform, we can include important psychographic information such as:. This information would allow us to focus our platform and design features which would allow the user to make choices on venue size, room type and customisations when making a booking via a mobile app. The Demographic profile helps us to develop empathy when investigating the goals of our audience.

Empathy is key to producing successful products which people actually use. The goal of a persona is the motivating factor that inspires action. Is it the reason they act and react the way they do and is also the path to building a successful solution.

With a collection of user personas, your design team can query planned features of a new product and predict how an audience might react. Setting real-world scenarios and playing them out for a persona can present answers to design questions. You analyse how your product would be used by your target audience in context to achieving their goals.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of what user personas are, why they are useful and what data they present. So how are they created? User personas can be created in a range of ways and there are lots of methods but all involve questioning real people and gathering data. Where possible you should perform high-quality interviews of actual people within your target group. Obtain observational data on how users act in certain scenarios using analytics, statistics and hands-on workshops.

The most accurate personas are based on real data so make sure you gather data from a sufficient number of people, as this is important for the next stage.

If you cannot interview real individuals due to time or budget constraints, it is still possible to create user personas — simply use the data you already have, the facts you already know, about your target audience. Use analytics data for web usage , customer services data such as customer calls or support tickets.

It may not give you a true real-world representation but acts as a sufficient placeholder until more worthy data is available to you. Purely made-up personas without any basis in fact can actually be damaging to the design process and the ultimate success of the product. The next step is to look at your data closely. You need to identify patterns in your data which will allow you to group users into personas.

If you are able, group users by behaviour or motivation as this tends to lead to a stronger profile and better representation of a group of people. This is important in the design process later on. This is where you create your personas. Personas are archetypes which model a specific set of your target audience. With all the data you now possess and the patterns and groupings you have identified you can start to define user personas.

These should be assembled around user patterns and habits — assuming you have identified them in the previous step. The number of personas you create is dependent on the amount of data you collected, the diversity of that data and the complexity of the goals your product needs to satisfy. A product with a single purpose aimed at a very tight niche market is likely to have only a single persona.

But a complex product such as a car would be expected to have a much broader target audience and therefore much larger pool of user data from which to generate multiple personas.

Building user empathy is the first stage in the design thinking process. The empathizing process involves observing and engaging with people the product is intended for and experiencing their physical environment. While most of a user persona description is rooted in research findings, it is still partially fictitious. When creating user persona descriptions, the data needs to be balanced with some fictional elements to create empathy.

Striking the right balance is vital. If the persona is created from too much research data and the design direction can lose focus, and if every detail is imaginary, the persona loses credibility. Only people who are very different from them would make different choices.

This scenario poses a real problem in UX design and often results in stereotypes and over-generalizations. By creating user personas, designers acknowledge this bias and design a user interface for someone who may not understand the experience in the same way as the product team. Through user research and testing, product teams can identify a completely different frame of reference from their own and then design for the experience level of that persona.

Similarly, individuals with specific knowledge about particular business functions will solve problems on their own level of experience.

Referring to user personas helps replace self-referential design decisions with more user-focused solutions. Raw data is often difficult to interpret; however, a persona encapsulates the research and communicates the trends to others in a way that they can understand and visualize. There are usually people with varying skills and expertise in a product team that could potentially cause a difference of opinion.

A user persona is an excellent tool to avoid confusion and miscommunication throughout the development process.

The persona communicates ideas and concepts with the product team and stakeholders. Effectively, a mobile app user persona ensures that everyone is on the same page and understands who will be using the product.

User personas bring generic user groups to life so that product teams can identify with them on a personal level. With data and empathy, user personas improve the quality and efficiency of design work. Designers can address user pain points accurately while meeting the needs of the business.

Additionally, narrowing in on a specific set of users will yield higher download rates, and more importantly, it will maintain in-app engagement over time. Clearbridge Mobile is an award-winning, full-stack mobile app development company dedicated to helping companies strategize, develop, and scale dynamic mobile app solutions that enhance business performance and enable innovative growth opportunities.

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