What would be the ideal way of truly understanding your user? Who are they? Where do they come from? What do they like and dislike. Before designing for our users its critical to truly understand them and their needs, goals, pain points and the frustrations that they have. Along these data points as designers we should also be aware about their context and the way they are and how they go about their lives. As designers we create products that are used by large number of users. A product may not have a single user type or personality that would be using it, but a large diaspora who might have similar traits, contexts, needs and frustrations. Collecting such data quantitively and summarizing it into a fictional character that closely represents our large set of users is what a User Persona represents. In this weeks essay we dive deep into what a User Persona is, how it must be created and what might be other best practices and methodologies that can help us visualize and articulate a fictional user for whom we can think and ideate over upon.

Board Scope Persona: A broad scope persona can be defined as a generalized user of an organization or company. Lets consider and a context of a car manufacturer, it might be a generalized customer who’d like to purchase a car for commute. These can be either young, middle-aged or older people with differed life contexts, needs and goals. If we’d have to consider designing a car for such a generalized user we might not be able to create the right car that all of these personas would like, need or even purchase hence understanding the users and developing persona on their overall needs and requirements leaves us with non qualitative data to work with, which can help us not solve and appeal for any of the user groups.

Narrow Scope Persona: A narrow scope persona is a well segregated set of users that we as designers can refer too, to create products and services that are more adaptable and relevant to real user group needs. Again in an instance of a car company we can consider qualitative data of a type of user based on their needs, goals and frustrations for instance a young person might consider purchasing a sports car that has vibrant colors and good looks and performance over a middle aged person looking for a MUV(Multi Utility Vehicle) for which they can use their kids to ferry to school or buy large amounts of groceries. These key considerations of a better understanding of a user adds more contextuality to our designs and makes it more relevant and adaptive to real user needs and goals.

" The broader the scope, the shallower the data supporting those personas. The smaller the scope, the richer the data."

If as designers we need more contextuality about the user and need to design products that meticulously are designed to solve a very specific user type or role we can further dig deep down and create few other types of personas that can better aide our user understanding and further well affect our end products.

Goal-directed - Where our objective is to evaluate the process and workflow that our user would prefer to utilize to achieve their goals in interacting with the product. These would probably aide a very specific need of a user more like user story would do, but a with a little twist in which: as a user I’d have to do this to get this done.

Role-based - This would be very similar to a goal directed persona with a further addition of a role, in which as a specific persona in a dedicated role: I would like something to help me achieve something that aides me in a specific circumstance to complete a job.

Engaging Personas - These are an amalgamation of goal and role based personas that are reinforced by reincarnating a specific user to emulate and make them more relatable and more realistic in the view of a designer. The engaging personas are backed by the emotions of the user, their psychology, feelings and backgrounds and make as relevant as they could be.

‍

Key considerations and crucial steps to take while creating a persona

Data Collection: Before creating a persona it is very import to learn about your user. High quality research both qualitative and quantitative is required before getting started on creating a persona.

Creating a hypothesis: Based on the research it is privy to create the right hypotheses, the persona’s characters must not be influenced by some data that is overvalued but limited and some data that is overlooked but substantial. The right balance of conclusive data with designers unbiased opinions can prove the deciding factor of the quality of a persona.

Not Too Many and Not Too Less: Designers must not create too many personas which are very specific to a user journey or to a specific need and not create too less personas that are generalistic and non qualitative. The right number for the right reasons must be identified to create a neutral product that works for everyone and is not specific to a subset of users.

Be Agile: Need of users can change over time and as they do it is important to keep the flexibility for the persona with time and changing circumstances of the users.

Conclusions

Overall, personas are a very powerful tool when it comes to understanding users and their needs, goals and frustrations. Data from research both qualitative and quantitative play an important role in developing personas and their success in our product. Understanding and defining the number of personas and where and how many are required in a project is important as there are no rules or limitations to doing that, it can always be decided case to case based on a specific projects needs.

References and deeper dive:

Just-Right Personas: How to Choose the Scope of Your Personas (2020). Available at: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/persona-scope/
Personas – A Simple Introduction (2020). Available at: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them