WHAT IS A USER PERSONA?:
A user persona is a fictional profile a designer creates based on people who took part in the user research survey.
WHATS THE PURPOSE OF A USER PERSONA?
They help the designer to understand the different user types, and to understand the variety of people that there could be potentially using the product. Because there is such a variety it will mean people will interact with the product in different ways, and so it’s vital that the designer understands this in detail. Creating personas will help the designer understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviours, difficulties, and goals, and will avoid the designer from just designing it for themselves.
HOW DO YOU CREATE THEM?
After reading the Interaction Design Foundations section on user personas, I now understand that in order to create them I must first:
- Collect extensive data on target users.
- Determine the qualities of and differences between users.
- Develop a hypothesis from the research, determining the qualities of and differences between users.
- Ensure stakeholders agree on the hypothesis about the users.
- Determine a number of personas – more than one per project, but focus especially on one.
- Name and describe each persona in 1-2 pages, including:
- A picture.
- User’s values, interests, education, lifestyle, needs, attitudes, desires, limitations, goals and behavior patterns.
- Extra details about the persona (e.g., interests) – anything to make him/her more real and relevant and help build empathy. A written story is better than bullet points.
- Describe several situations/scenarios prompting the persona to use your product – put him/her in contexts with problems to overcome.
- Include everyone involved in the project so they’ll accept the persona or advise revisions.
- Send them the persona to use in their work.
- Ensure everyone develops scenarios – these should expose the persona optimally to potential use cases.
- Make continuous adjustments – revisit the persona; add new features; add required new personas; discard outdated personas.
