Episode 17: Episode 17: User Personae

Akylles Talks

A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer. You’ll start the design process by conducting user research—building empathy with your target users and identifying exactly what they need from the product you’re designing. A persona is generally based on this user research and incorporates your target audience's needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns. Whether you’re developing a smartphone app or a mobile-responsive website, it’s essential to understand who will be using the product. To solve a real user problem, you need to have a clear problem statement in mind; to write this problem statement, you first need to understand your users and their needs. Knowing your audience will help influence the features and design elements you choose, thus making your product more useful. A persona clarifies who is in your target audience by answering the following questions: Who is my ideal customer? What are the current behavior patterns of my users? What are the needs and goals of my users? What issues and pain points do they currently face within the given context? Understanding the needs of your users is vital to developing a successful product. Well-defined personas will enable you to identify and communicate user needs efficiently. Personas will also help you describe the individuals who use your product, which is essential to your overall value proposition. Personas help with strategizing and making smart design decisions. They make real users memorable for the product team, helping to focus efforts and build empathy. In a nutshell, user personas are crucial if you want to design something useful, desirable, and valuable to your target audience. A solid user persona is your northern star, guiding your design decisions from start to finish. Not only that. Most designers work in multidisciplinary teams where it’s important to communicate your findings from the user research stage. Personas encompass all the essential details about your users, presenting them in a memorable way that everyone can understand—not just designers. A well-defined user persona contains four key pieces of information: - Header - Demographic profile - The end goal(s) - Scenario Before you create a persona, conduct plenty of research to make sure your personas accurately represent your users. After you gather an adequate amount of qualitative and quantitative data, organize the information into persona groups representing your ideal customers. Remember to focus on the most important user groups' major needs—you can’t be everything to everyone, nor should you try to be! Once you’ve got your user groups, you can turn them into user personas. Let’s take a look at the four steps that go into creating a user persona. Step 1: Add a header The header includes a fictional name, image, and quote that summarizes what matters most to the persona related to your product. These features help improve memorability, keeping your design team focused on the users they are building the product for. Let’s imagine you’re designing a travel app. The foundations of your user persona could look like this: Name: Mariam Kenorabi Summary quote: “Take me to undiscovered holiday destinations away from the tourist traps.” This first step might seem simple, but these features ensure that your persona is memorable, keeping the design team focused on who they are designing for. Step 2: Add a demographic profile While the name and image can be fictional, demographic details are factual and based on user research. The demographic profile includes four main sections: personal background, professional background, user environment, and psychographics. Personal background The personal background includes age, gender, ethnicity, education, persona group (e.g., working moms), and family status (e.g., single, married with children, widowed, etc.). Mariam’s personal background might be described as follows: Mariam, 52 years old, a divorced mother of two, has a Master’s degree in chemistry. Professional background The professional background includes details such as job occupation, income level, and work experience. Here we might add that Mariam works full-time at a pharmaceuticals company and earns around $65,000 per year. User environment The user environment represents the physical, social, and technological context of the user. This section is used to answer questions like What technological devices do users have access to? Do they spend most of their time in a corporate office or a home office? And how often do they collaborate with others? So, Mariam's user environment could be in her office, mostly on a laptop, but also on her iPad when commuting to and from work. Psychographics Psychographics include details such as attitudes, interests, motivations, and pain points. Creating a psychographic profile enables you to understand better why your user behaves in a certain way—including why they use your product. Let’s continue to imagine you’re designing a holiday-booking app. Some useful psychographic information to include in your user persona could be: Mariam - Enjoys luxury spa retreats, hates tourist traps - Appreciates an element of exclusivity - Enjoys trying authentic local cuisine - Prefers to travel alone or with one other person - Tends to favor quality over economy - Overall, the demographic profile adds a layer of realism to a user persona, boosting empathy when exploring user needs and goals. Step 3: Add end goal(s) The end goal is the motivating factor that inspires action and answers the question: what do users want or need to accomplish using your product? End goals are your users' main driving forces and determine what the persona wants or needs to fulfill. In Mariam's case, her end goal when using your holiday-booking app is to discover and book luxurious, off-the-beaten-track holiday destinations. Step 4: Add a scenario A scenario is a “day-in-the-life” narrative that describes how a persona would interact with your product in a particular context to achieve his or her end goal(s). The scenario usually defines when, where, and how the narrative takes place. They are typically written from the persona's perspective and describe use cases that may happen in the future. For example, Mariam's scenario could start like this: “At least once a year, I like to go away on a luxury holiday. I try to discover places I’ve never been to before and to stick to destinations that aren’t yet overrun with tourists. I work full time, so I don’t have that much time to browse and book each holiday's individual element. Ideally, I’ll find some package deal that comes with local restaurant recommendations…” Check the full guide on www.startupkudos.com IG: @ramialame