Persona
This article written for completing PPL 2021 Individual Review competencies
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In Software Development, the functionality of the software is not only the aspect that we should pursued, we should also pursued a good UI/UX (User Interface/User Experience) in our software. A bad UI/UX in our software could hinder the performance of the software due to user inconvenience in using the software. Designing good UI/UX for software product user could be a challenging task and we need a guideline to do it, Persona could be one of the tools to guide in designing software product.
What is Persona?
Persona are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Each persona represents one particular user group, and created from analyzing and categorizing data from user research forming character from combination from common traits of multiple actual people making up a specific user group.
Personas will help product designer and developers to understand the users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, frustration, and goals. Persona could give a solid guidelines for designing a product that could avoid us from design changes each customer request due to lack of customer understanding, avoid us from enforcing our self referential design to the product that may not suit well with the customer, and persona could help us focusing on what features in our product that we should prioritize and avoid us from spending time in a feature that customer will never use.
What makes a good persona?
A good persona always use actual user data to prevent from designer bias, represent real users for it’s product, and it provide specific information in user priority and needs in the product.
Persona should be represent as a detailed bio to humanize the cold data and make it more engaging and could capture the most important information about each user group, such as:
- Goals: What are users trying to achieve, such as tasks they want to perform
- Behavior: Online and offline behavior patterns, helping to identify users’ goals.
- Attitudes: Relevant attitudes that predict how users will behave
- Motivations: Why users want to achieve these goals
- Frustration: What problems do the user have that could be solve by product that you build.
Tips for making persona
- Don’t confuse demographic and person
A useful persona is always more than an age and a job title, because it helps you understand the motivations, fears, and concerns of your ideal customer and market.
- Don’t just ‘come up’ with personas: base them on real people
Fictional personas should not be derived from fictional user stories, your user more know what they need rather than what you have perceived. Forcing to use fictional user stories could lead to self referential design problem.
- Keep an open mind
Do not set an expectation on user answer and tempted to follow your bias. Even though you are probably more experienced in UI/EX you should let user answers become insight to guide you.
- Detailed Bio
A detailed bio could humanize the cold and raw data that you received and makes the persona more engaging.
I hope this article could help in creating persona that suits well with your user base :D.
