Why use personas

Christie also streams all of her music and she watches movies online since she does not want to own a TV. Christie gets up at 7 am.

She eats breakfast at home and leaves for university at 8. Depending on her schedule, she studies by herself or attends a class. She has 15 hours of classes at Masters level every week, and she studies for 20 hours on her own. Christie dreams of a future where she can combine work and travel.

She wants to work in a third world country helping others who have not had the same luck of being born into a wealthy society. The method of developing personas stems from IT system development during the late s where researchers had begun reflecting on how you could best communicate an understanding of the users. Various concepts emerged, such as user archetypes, user models, lifestyle snapshots, and model users.

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.

Does the thought of segmenting your research results scare you? Even if you are doing the user research through online survey forms, you would agree that just the thought of analyzing data and converting it into useful information is intimidating. Nobody would read them. This is exactly where user personas act as a knight in shining armor. Creating user personas helps you keep your whole team aligned with the design process. Personas are the go-to documents which ensure that every design decision is aligned with the intended user.

They also serve as a reminder to designers that they should stick with their target audience. You can print them and keep them handy for any design discussions in future. The first difference between the right kind of personas and wrong ones is authentic data. A lot of designers and design teams fancy building the personas but what they miss out is user research. Another difference is the format of personas. Look at the example shared in the previous section; you will find the notes utterly chaotic.

The reasons for using the platform are entirely different for a recruiter and an interviewer. So a persona cannot be a one-liner description of the user. Julie is a year old HR professional.

She has a decade of experience in the industry. Although Julie feels that the traditional methods of hiring are better, she is still positive about using an online platform for hiring.

She also wants to collect candidate feedback so that a transparent system is in place. At their core, personas are about creating products with a specific, not generic, user in mind. The usefulness of personas in defining and designing digital products has become more widely accepted in the last few years.

User personas are archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. Usually, a persona is presented in a one or two-page document like the one you can see in the example below.

Such 1—2-page descriptions include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and background information, as well as the environment in which a persona operates. Designers usually create user persona template templates, which include a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character e.

A deep understanding of a target audience is fundamental to creating exceptional products. Here are some of the benefits of using personas in the UX design process :.

Empathy is a core value if designers want to make something that is good for the people who are going to use it. Personas help designers to create understanding and empathy with the end-users. Thanks to personas designers can:. User personas help designers shape product strategy and accompany during the usability testing sessions.

A deep understanding of user behavior and needs makes it possible to define who a product is being created for and what is necessary or unnecessary for them from a user-centered point of view. This allows product teams to prioritize feature requests for example, features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of a primary persona. UX designers should find a proper balance between both the needs of the business and users to create a harmonious solution.

Most designers work in multidisciplinary teams that have team members with varying expertise, experience, and points of view. A nuanced analysis of their anti-persona perspectives is beyond the scope of this article but is definitely worth further reading.

Any tool can be used for good or evil, and personas are no different. If used improperly, as when personas are not based on research with the exception of provisional personas, which are based on anecdotal, secondhand information or which are used as a precursor or supplement to firsthand research , or if made up of fluffy information that is not pertinent to the design problem at hand, or if based solely on market research as opposed to ethnographic research , then personas will impart an inaccurate understanding of users and provide a false sense of security in the user-centered design process.

As far as I can tell, only two scientifically rigorous academic studies on the effectiveness of personas have been conducted: the first by Christopher N. Chapman in , and the second by Frank Long in Though small, both concluded that using personas as part of the design process aided in producing higher-quality and more successful designs.

These studies join a growing body of peer-reviewed work that supports the use of personas, including studies by Kim Goodwin, Jeff Patton, David Hussman and even Donald Norman. The anecdotal evidence from these and many other writers has shown how personas can have a profoundly positive impact on the design process.

Personas, goals and scenarios tap into our humanity because they anthropomorphize research findings. When hundreds or even thousands of users are represented by a persona, imagining what they would do is a lot easier than pouring over cold, hard, abstract data.

This potent combination of personas, goals and scenarios help the designer to avoid thinking in the abstract and to focus on how software could be used in an idealized yet more concrete and humanistic future. To determine whether personas would be appropriate, a designer must first step back and determine who they are designing for. Determining the audience for a design is deceptively simple, yet many people never think to take the time to explicitly figure this out.

The fundamental premise of user-centered design is that as knowledge of the user increases, so too does the likelihood of creating an effective design for them. Designers do design for themselves from time to time, but professionally most design for others. If they are doing it for others, then they could be designing for only two possible kinds of people: those who are like them and those who are not like them. If they are designing for people like them, then they could probably get away without personas, although personas might help.

Usually, though, designers design for people unlike themselves , in which case getting to know as much as possible about the users by using personas is recommended.