Personify Users’ Needs With Persona
Designing a product is all about solving the user’s problem. To develop the right solution for the problem, it is essential to understand the users’ needs. For that, the right design process and tools are needed.
User Centered Design
User-centered design (UCD) is one of the design processes that is done iteratively with each of the phases focused on the users and their needs. In UCD, users are involved throughout the design process to help designers understand the user needs to be able to create a highly usable product.
In general, UCD process includes four phases. The first process is to understand the context in which the user will use the system. From that, the user requirements are specified. Then, designers start to develop the solutions needed. After that, designers evaluate the resulted design towards the previously specified user requirements.
These phases are not in any way linear. UCD is a very iterative process, in which after designers evaluate the design, they can move back to the first, second, or third phase. It is then repeated until the design evaluation meets the user requirements.
Developing a design solution is the main part of the process. It is really crucial to ideate a solution from the user's needs. It is also hard because the data collected may vary from each user. So how do we know the exact guide of what the user needs? How do we bridge the gap between the data and the solution we want to build? As insignificant as it may seem, Persona is actually the answer we need.
So, what is Persona?
Persona is a fictional yet realistic portrayal of the product’s target user. It is a profile of a person that is not real but is based on real people. From the conducted research, we can identify and notice some similar patterns in its result. We can take this pattern and create it as a profile of a person. So each Persona represents a group of target users with some similarities.
Why is it any good? How is it any help?
Persona provides focus on understanding the user’s needs. The research data are a lot of data to be used for deciding the user need. It is hard to focus on how the target user is. With persona, it clarifies who we design the product for. It ‘personify’ the user’s needs. It makes it easier to understand the need of a group of users.
Persona also helps to give the same perspective of the target user for everyone in the project. It is a really helpful guide to hold on to during discussions within the team or with each stakeholder. It gives a clear and consistent profile of the target user throughout the project.
With persona, it is easier to sort unnecessary features — because we can’t satisfy everyone, right? We can sort things and put only the majority of the user’s needs based on the research, to the persona. Persona is an effective solution that will also help other processes e.g. making user scenarios to be easier later on.
How to make one, then?
The format of a persona itself actually varies, the detail it provides depends on each need. However, these steps below are some of the steps that you can follow.
- The first thing to do before making a persona would be doing plenty of research, either quantitative or qualitative. It will provide actual data of your target users, whether about their demography, needs, goals, etc.
- The next thing to do is to organize all the data obtained into persona groups. From that group, we can then combine it into a single persona. So a single persona represents a single group.
- We can start making the persona by giving it a name, photo, and tagline. These would help to memorize the persona easier.
- After that, we can make the demographic profile of the persona. It adds realism to the persona and helps us to empathize with the target user more. It is important to remember that all the demographic data added must be based on factual data or research.
- Next, we need to add the most important information in the persona, the user’s needs, and goals. It is what our product tries to accommodate. Just like the other data, it must be based on research.
- Lastly, we can add scenarios on how the persona will interact with our product to achieve their goals.
The example of how my project use Persona
Here I’ll show you some of the examples of how Persona helps us to decide how we design our product.
Motivations
On the Persona above, we can see that Budi, as an administrator, has a motivation to add, edit, and modify the course schedule.
But as an administrator, there will be so many courses that are shown. Therefore, we change our wireframe design, from showing each of the course schedules in the time slot, to show the accumulated version of the course schedules in the time slot. This way, it will be easier for Budi as an administrator to see the schedules and thus will be easier for him to choose which one he wants to edit.
Frustrations
On the Persona above, we can see that Alifia, as a teacher assistant, has frustration because of the limited time in using the Zoom free account. Also, in her motivation, she wants to be able to use a premium Zoom meeting outside the course’s regular schedule. Therefore, we accommodate teaching assistants to be able to book for a premium Zoom meeting.
Goals
On the Persona above, we can see that Putri, as a lecturer, has a specific goal to be able to have an organized space that saves the recordings of her lecture classes. Therefore, we accommodate a feature to show the list of the class recordings. That way, Putri can easily access her class’s recordings and choose the recording she wants based on the date.
Now you can see how Persona helps us to decide the features and designs for each of the user roles of our product.😊
Caution when making Persona
No matter how we try to make a 100% valid persona, it is not impossible that we may have some of our own opinions mixed in while making them. Here are some things that we need to be more careful on:
- Being bias. We need to be careful about being bias while making the demographic profile. We also need to remember not to put unnecessary or over-detailed information here.
- Choosing a stereotypical photo or name. We need to be careful when picking a photo and name for our persona, it is better to avoid those that can make others stereotypically judge it.
Does persona still look insignificant to you? I hope not, since it makes a lot of things easier.
What else to wait for? Now go and starts making your own product’s persona! Be simple, and personify your user’s needs!
