Persona versus Proto-Persona
With a Free Downloadable Template for E-Commerce Persona
My very beginning experience with Persona is when I worked as a UX design student assistant. We held a workshop to create proto-persona for our platforms. It was fascinating and brought everyone whether he or she is a user experience expert or not to the same page. We left these proto-personas as posters and decorated all over the office. And this helps all the people within this office to keep users in mind.
During working in the industry, I found most people don’t know exactly the differences between proto-persona and persona. Therefore, I would like to clarify these two first.
Proto-persona as mentioned, is used mostly for agile development, and good for brainstorming. Proto-persona helps all the team members who may not be familiar with real users to have silhouette of users. And when planning a new project or a new function, it ensures everyone is on the same page. It facilitate communication and team work.
However, Persona is much more robust. Persona must derive from quantitative and qualitative user research. Each time when executing user research, no matter which approach you use. You gain the user information and design insights to grow personas. It would be better to generate 3 to 5 personas to ensure you include all kinds of users (from naive users to sophisticated users). And, the most important thing is, after each user research, to validate and examine your personas. Persona is a flexible tool, not only user experience designer but also all the team members should keep in mind. It should be extended and modified all the time.
For better understanding, I concluded 5 elements for you to enrich your persona. This template is for e-commerce users, however, I believe designers who worked in other areas can modify it to fit into.
There are 5 elements composed the Persona, the Basic, Tech, Online Shopping, Service and Behavior information. Like above.
Basic including Name, Gender, Age, Marriage, Family, Pet, Occupation, Income, and Quotes, such as “How I view myself” and “The most important thing to me”.
Tech including Device in use, Operation System, Time spent on the Internet, Social Media, the Attitude toward technology.
Online Shopping (general) including Online shopping frequency, Money spent per month, the Sensibility to fashion, Online shopping product category, and Frequently used platform.
Service (specific) including Loyalty, Started to use since when, Touch points, How the user feels about this service, and the Whole brand experience (both online and offline).
Behavior: including the User flow, Motivation, Goal, Usage scenario, the Search/Browse behavior, User Behavior, Shopping preference, Expectation, and Pain points.
Creating persona is as creating a vivid character. It enhance empathy. You and your team know exactly what kind of person he or she is, what is his or her goal, and in what situation, he or she will behave.
Here is the downloadable template on Dribbble. Feel free to access.
I would like to quote Alan Cooper’s tweet here, and hope you enjoy the process of creating personas for your service.
Personas don’t represent users. They represent users’ goals. If you can’t reduce the number of goals of your user community down to very few, you don’t understand your users, your product, your business, or interaction design. — Alan Cooper
