Objectives

Upon completion of this lesson, you will be able to:

  • understand the concept of personas for solution design
  • select a persona design perspective
  • design personas through a 9-step design process
  • build a persona profile

Introduction

Personas are a staple of user-centered design, specifically in the area of interaction design. They are fictional characters created to represent different user types that might use a service, product, or website in a similar way. Personas are often created based on user research and include a great deal of detail about their behaviors, attitudes, and backgrounds.

Alan Cooper, a pioneer of interaction design, is often credited with the creation of personas as a practical interaction design tool. Cooper argued that when designers have a tangible understanding of who their user is, they’re able to design more effective interfaces. The persona method has been used since the late 1990s in market research, user interface design, communication planning, and service design.

How to Create Personas:

Creating personas typically involves the following steps:

  1. Research: This can involve user interviews, observations, surveys, or other methods of data collection. The goal is to understand user behaviors, needs, goals, and motivations.

  2. Identification of Patterns: Once the research is collected, designers look for commonalities and patterns among users. This might involve looking for similar behaviors, needs, or goals.

  3. Creation of Persona Groups: Based on these patterns, designers then create a persona group for each. These groups should represent a unique segment of the user base.

  4. Detailed Descriptions: Each persona is then given a detailed description, which often includes a name, demographic information, a backstory, an occupation, motivations, needs, pain points, and behavioral patterns.

  5. Application to the Design Process: Once personas are created, they’re used throughout the design process to guide design decisions and to ensure that the product meets the needs of its users.

When to Use Personas:

Personas are a valuable tool that can be used throughout the design process. Here are some specific scenarios in which they can be particularly helpful:

  1. Product or Service Design: Personas can help guide the design of a new product or service by keeping user needs and behaviors at the forefront.

  2. User Experience (UX) Design: Personas can help UX designers understand how different types of users might interact with a product, website, or service.

  3. Marketing and Strategy: Personas can help strategists and marketers understand their target audience and tailor their messages accordingly.

  4. Development and Testing: Developers can use personas to better understand the users they are developing for and testers can use them to ensure all user needs are met.

Personas should be used when there’s a need for a deep understanding of user behaviors, needs, and goals. They can be particularly helpful when a team is finding it hard to reach consensus, when there’s a lack of clarity about who the user is, or when a product is not meeting user needs or business goals.

Personas force the designer to consider different perspectives rather than inadvertently only their own perspective.

Persona

A persona is a description of a fictitious user based on either assumptions or data collected through research. It is a tool used to better understand and empathize with users that a product or service is designed for. Personas represent different types of users within a single social group. For example, a shopper at a department store might be:

– A young person looking for their first suit – A business person looking for casual wear – A woman looking for accessories

A persona is usually described in a narrative form, somewhat like a character description in a novel, including demographics, lifestyle, preferences, values, and attitudes.

Here’s an example of a persona:

Name: “Techie Tim”

Age: 34

Occupation: IT consultant

Education: Master’s degree in Computer Science

Location: Seattle, Washington

Bio: Techie Tim is a tech enthusiast who loves to stay updated with the latest technology trends. He works long hours but enjoys his job immensely. He is passionate about gaming, coding, and blogging about new tech gadgets. He’s always the go-to person in his friend circle for any tech advice. He enjoys spending his weekends exploring new gadgets, watching sci-fi movies, or playing video games.

Goals: 1. To stay updated with the latest tech trends. 2. To find reliable, in-depth reviews of tech products. 3. To improve his knowledge and skills in the tech field.

Challenges: 1. Finding unbiased reviews of tech products. 2. Balancing his work and personal life. 3. Keeping up with the rapid pace of technological advancement.

Favorite Brands: Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Sony

Technological Proficiency: Expert

By creating personas like Techie Tim, designers and developers get a tangible understanding of who they are building a product for, helping to guide design decisions and user experience strategies. It provides insights into the user’s goals, challenges, and needs, allowing for a more personalized and effective solution.

Eliciting Personas

Discovering and creating personas involve various research methods to understand the behavior, preferences, and needs of your users. Here are some strategies for discovering personas:

  1. User Interviews: Interviews with users can be one of the most insightful methods of understanding the needs, motivations, and behavior of your target audience. You can ask about their experiences, perceptions, and attitudes towards the product or service you are offering.

  2. Surveys and Questionnaires: This method allows you to reach a larger number of people quickly. Ask questions about their behaviors, preferences, and experiences related to your product or service.

  3. User Observation: Direct observation can be a powerful tool to understand how users interact with your product in their natural environment. This could be conducted in the form of usability testing or field studies.

  4. Market Research: Examine existing research about your target market. This could include demographic information, consumer behavior studies, or industry trends.

  5. Analytics Data: Analytics from your website or app can provide quantitative data on user behavior. Look for patterns in the data that could suggest different types of users.

  6. Focus Groups: Gather small groups of potential users for discussion. Focus groups can generate insights into attitudes, perceptions, and ideas from your target audience.

  7. User Testing: Get users to try out your product or service and provide feedback. This will give you insights into their needs, frustrations, and points of satisfaction.

  8. Customer Feedback: Look at existing feedback from your customers. This could include reviews, customer service inquiries, or social media comments.

After gathering data from these strategies, look for patterns and similarities among users. These commonalities can help you form distinct groups, each of which can be developed into a persona. Remember, the purpose of personas is to represent the needs and goals of your users, so keep them in mind during your research.

Benefits of the Persona Method

Personas provide several distinct benefits to analysts and solution designers:

  • a better understanding of product users, customers, and stakeholders
  • shorter and more focused design cycles
  • improved product fit
  • more likely to address user needs
  • more usable solutions, products, or services

Persona Design Approaches

There are four perspectives commonly used for persona design:

  • Goal-directed perspective
  • Role-based perspective
  • Engaging perspective
  • Fiction-based perspective

The first three are based on data and research while the last one is based on the designer’s assumptions and intuition.

Goal-Directed Perspective

In this method, personas are not average users but rather extreme characters highlighting the stratification within a class of user or a role. Start with a large number of personas identified through ethnographic research, surveys, or focus groups. Then describe the work goals, workflows, and processes carried by each persona. Next, group the personas by similar needs, goals, and relationship with the product to be designed. After that, reduce the number of personas to a few that highlight the needs of different users. Lastly, we rank the personas based on priority and start analyzing the needs of the highest priority persona.

Role-Based Perspective

Role-based personas are also data-driven and based on qualitative and quantitative research like goal-directed personas. Personas are used in this approach to communicate insights from market research and are based on actual data.

Each persona should include information about:

  • Size of market share for this persona
  • Computer proficiency
  • Demographic profile
  • Hopes and fears
  • Typical day or week in the life of the persona

Engaging Perspective

While this approach is also rooted in research and data, it considers also the psychological characteristics of the personas to provide designers with a more complete understanding of the person rather than building a stereotypical representation.

Personas include not only demographic profiles, goals, and needs, but also:

  • Social background
  • Psychological characteristics
  • Emotional relationship with the product or domain

In this persona perspective, the designer can add assumptions and fictitious information.

Fiction-Based Perspective

In this approach, designers construct ad-hoc descriptions based on intuition, assumption, or gut feeling about their prospective users. This method focuses on generating extreme personas to explore the edges of the design space and needs of outliers.

Proto-personas emerge not from market research or ethnography, but rather from brainstorming sessions. Names are often fictional and might even be based on fictional characters, such as “Bridget Jones” or “James Bond”.

Scenarios and Personas

Once personas have been identified through one or more of the methods described before, continue by describing usage scenarios for each persona. Start by identifying the most common usage scenario and then venture into alternate and exception scenarios. At each step of the normal scenario, ask:

  • Is this step always done like this?
  • Does it have to be done this way or can it be done differently?
  • Does everyone do it this way? Who doesn’t?
  • When is it done differently? If so, why?
  • What happens when it’s done differently?

Prioritizing Personas

It may not always be possible to address the needs of all personas. Personas need to be prioritized and ranked based on:

  • Anticipated number of instances of a persona
  • Frequency of use
  • Influence of persona instances
  • Market potential
  • Competitive or market opportunities
  • Alignment with core competencies
  • Scope Management with Personas

Scope Management with Personas

Note that it may not always be possible or practical to accommodate the needs to all personas. Product owners may be forced to focus the product on specific personas and therefore limit the “marketability”, “applicability”, or “relevance” for certain users. This may require different products or designs for different users. In an incremental approach, different releases may address the needs of different personas, starting with the most important persona.

Personas for Gap Analysis

When a new persona emerges, does the system accommodate them or are there “gaps”? Be sure that you did not miss a persona. In addition, consider describing “idiot” personas and “hostile” personas, like hackers.

User Stories with Personas

When using personas with user stories, change the story template to read:

[Persona] wants to [goal], so that [he/she] [purpose].

Summary of Persona Design Process

Requirements Model

We can summarize the model of requirements with personas and user stories with the following UML Class Diagram:

user-story-persona-uml

Lecture

The lecture below by Dr. Schedlbauer summarizes key concepts about personas the the development process for personas.

Slide Deck: S-90-304 Personas

Summary

Files & Resources

All Files for Lesson 90.304

Errata

Let us know.