User Personas: Where to begin?
Creating a user persona can be a little complicated, especially if you’re new to this. I remember the first time I heard about creating a persona — it seemed funny, futile, and daunting at the same time. How am I going to get into the heads of the audience? How do I know what they want? Does this even work? Well, the short answers to these questions are: you can with some effort, that’s where research comes in, and it works all the time.
Personas are extremely helpful, particularly when you’re creating a lot of content (for example, a website, blogs, a user manual, or a mobile app) because you want the experience to be both helpful and interesting for your audience. In order to achieve these goals, you must first understand who your users, audience, viewers, or readers are and what do they need and expect from you? In other words, you need a user persona.
Prerequisites: Understand what you have
Before even thinking about the audience, you need to have a very clear idea of your product, service, and content. You need to know what your goals are, what is it that you are giving to the users, and what’re your limitations. This is where you need to have a lot of work to do on building your product. You’ll have to ask a lot of questions.
For example, if you decide to create a smartphone app for locating restaurants in any region, the following questions (among many others) are of importance.
- Will the app work on Android or iOS phones (or both)?
- Will the app be restricted to a specific city or country?
- Do you want users and restaurant owners to interact with each other via reviews and chat?
- Will the app be free to use or do you aim to earn money per sign-up?
All personas have one thing in common: they tell you about your audience keeping your own goals at the heart of it all.
The above list, though not exhaustive, gives an idea of what kind of things you need to look at before you start understanding the audience. You need to be aware of what you have before knowing who your audience is.
1. User research
The first and, arguably, the most demanding step is to conduct user research. With a good idea of your product, service, and/or content, you can now start gathering data about your prospective audience. You can conduct surveys and interviews to get to know the people. While doing so, you will come across a lot of information about your audience, ranging from their age and gender to the type of phone they use and how comfortable they are with technology. This is where you need to pick and choose the characteristics that are important for your product.
Going back to the restaurant locating app, some of the key areas to look for can be:
- Type of food people like
- Frequency of dining out
- Type of phone (Android, iOS, etc.)
- Comfort with using mobile apps
- Food-related apps they already use, if any
This step can be challenging because humans are not easy to work with. However, with some research, you will find a lot of useful information about your prospective users. Based on this information, you can now understand the way your audience deals with a particular type of information. This can help you align your product’s goals with the expectations of the users.
2. Group the audience
Dealing with humans individually is not an easy task but when you bring them together into groups, things start making a lot more sense. This is exactly what you need to do to create an effective user persona. The responses you get from people will have a lot in common. All you need to do is to find those commonalities, cluster them, and create groups of your audience.
One way to do that, in the case of the restaurant locating app, is to group the audience as ‘Android users’ and ‘iOS users’ (others can include age groups, comfort with technology, food preferences, etc.). Now you can understand the needs of these groups by identifying their dining patterns, food preferences, and their expectations from an app like yours. It is also interesting to note the intersections between different groups to identify what is common among them. That way, you can have a better idea of the needs of everyone and those of a particular group as well.
3. Bring it all together
At this point, you have done most of the work needed to create a persona. All you need to do now is to gather all the information representative of a group and you’ll have your persona ready. It is important to note that the decision to keep certain traits (and let others go) is yours. It is, however, not independent of the goals that you have for your product.
Create at least one persona per audience group.
The information you retain for your persona should highlight the needs of your users and their comfort level when interacting with your service. For the above example, some of the most important things to focus on are as follows.
- Comfort with technology
- Type of phone
- Familiarity with (and hence expectations from) a restaurant locating app
Some other traits which are almost always used, and help a lot in understanding the audience, include:
- A fictional name for the persona
- Age, gender, and other personal traits
Best practices: Things to remember
All user personas are unique. However, all personas have one thing in common: they tell you about your audience keeping your own goals at the heart of it all. To make a strong user persona, the following are some of the best practices.
- Create at least one persona per audience group, so that all segments of your users get a representation
- Clearly define the traits that are important for your product
- Add user scenarios where needed so that the pain points of users can also be understood
- Make your persona generic so it can represent all types of users in a group
- Keep your personas flexible so these can be altered over time if needed
There is a lot of room for creativity and experiments in user personas. The important thing, however, is to use a focused approach where you know what your end goal is.
Sources
- Usability.gov. Personas.
- Talebook in UX Planet. How to create Personas, a step by step guide.
- Shirley Qiany in UX Collective. A Personas Guideline, From What They Are to How To Use.
- Cooper. Creating Personas.
