Persona: in their shoes
The saying of “To catch a criminal, you must think like one” applies in designing software as well, sort of.
Overview
One of the powers of human minds is that we realize that there might be other minds that think differently than ours. And to see what the others’ minds are up to, sometimes we rely on guessing. Nailing it right could benefit us by meeting their expectations, or ours.
In software engineering and design, we aim to catch our users right at their expectations.
Personas
In software engineering, we aim to deliver software that meets our users' needs. Not only these needs are meant to be satisfied feature-wise, but also their needs of comfort and easiness of use.
The users might not be just a human, an application can have tens, hundreds, if not thousands of users. We are aware that no humans are completely alike, therefore each can have different preferences. Yet, we try our best to draw the most fittable line that can satisfy most of our customers. This is where personas come in.
Personas are fictional characters representing (the majority) of our potential users. Each character is generated through qualitative and quantitative researches to ensure that each of them is carefully described and realistic. These descriptions consist of their behaviors: what they would feel/think of the software, what are their main intentions of using the software, their vital satisfaction points, their stress points, expectations, and others.
Using this information, the software would then be built on these targets — to satisfy their needs and preferences. This is indeed a powerful tool to design UI/UX of a software.
Impacts of having Personas
Although they are not real people, personas are considered more realistic, concise, and concrete. It acts as a compact guide as it is the most typical image of the real type of persons they represent. Therefore, it is a great reminder for developers to create better user experience models by referring to what would the users be most comfortable with. This is why it could facilitate developments. Here are the impacts:
- Examination of users — the design team will know more about the users as well as know which type of people needs their products more.
- Sanctions user-centered design — pushes the development to be centered on users, not features. This way, any version of the product will have better usabilities.
- Avoid design conflict — Every design conflict could refer to this persona as the determining standard. Designers can adapt their decisions to this model.
- Function prioritization — On each version, personas can help the developer on determining which features are being focused/used more. By referring to the persona, developers can focus more on building more vital features and avoid less important ones.
- User behavior prediction — The stress points, satisfaction factors, and motivations of each persona can be utilized to reduce user-usability testing.
- Design Rankings — Personas can help developers to determine the most important design elements which then could be prioritized.
- Time-Saving — Personas can eliminate a large chunk of labors that is in traditional user demands research methods.
How to create Personas
- Determine the method of research — based on the numbers of users, the details needed, and the type of product, determine which method of research suits your team the best.
- Finding users — Bring your research method to the users, enrich yourselves with the data. Ask what you need to know about them, what they want from your product, and what they don’t.
- Build hypotheses — Infer from the results why did you get that kind of results.
- Verify hypotheses — Check to the users, from them directly or verify it from the data gathered. This way you would be able to determine the groups’ satisfiers/stressors.
- Generate user patterns — Classify the users into groups, which then be represented by a persona.
- Design scenarios — Design and determine the scenarios each persona would go through if they were to use your product. Use this step to revalidate your hypotheses and refine the details of your personas' characteristics.
- Fill the persona descriptions — Write the characteristics and descriptions of each persona.
Make sure that your persona has at least your users’:
- Personalities (Judgemental, detail orientation, etc),
- Important/Relevant attributes (gender, age, position/rank, skills, and background),
- The motivation for using your application,
- The goals of using your application and your application most important contributions to them,
- Stress points,
- Comforter.
During the making of persona, pay attention to these key points:
- Make sure each persona sufficiently reflects the data and conclusion drawn from it.
- Show the current state of the potential users, not their expectations of the future of the product.
- Be realistic and aware that it is impossible to satisfy everyone, do not be overly idealistic. At the same time, you can use this opportunity to challenge the group to improve users' satisfaction.
- Remember the aim of personas is to help the group to understand the users better, so make it concise and representational.
The persona of our users
Below is two personas of our users. Only two? Well yes, our users are divided into 2 major groups: admins and officers. Take a look at them! These are written in Indonesian, but I assure you they follow the points I stated above.
For example, we can see that the users of our applications are quite well educated and experienced with technology (mobile apps). This way we can be more confident in putting symbols that are common in applications (share button, other buttons, etc).
We also need to focus on how practical they want the app to be. Since speed and easiness is their priority, we have to make sure the flow of our app is not too complicated. In another way, simplicity over details. And they also want the data to be editable, but safe to be edited. Our response is to make them be able to edit data easily, but we record the history of their actions in our app as well (considering the data is private and need to be secured.
There you go. May this leads you to be able to get closer to your users and create better User Personas. Have fun!
