To make the best products for your customers, you have to think like them.
This article was written as a submission of CS UI’s software development course’s article task.
We all want to make the best product for our customers. It makes sense from both a business perspective and a moral perspective. Creating a product that has good functionality and strong fundamentals will make your product usable and will give your customers a reason to use your product, but creating a product that your customers actually like will give them a reason to stay.
I’m sure we all want our customers to keep choosing our product over someone else’s, so how do we go about making a product that is both functional and liked by them? Not to mention, the users won’t be a carbon copy of one another, they will all have different personalities with many different use cases. That, is where personas come in.
What’s a Persona?
Basically, a Persona is a representation of a group of people that are likely to use your product. In other words, your target demographic. Personas help all kinds of roles in making their jobs easier.
For example, designers will get a point of reference on how their UI/UX should cater to; if your app has a target demographic of elderly people, then you probably wouldn’t want to design your app with a ton of small texts and widgets. It also helps developers in prioritizing features, and by helping them understand the users’ needs, developers can also wrap their heads around a requirement better.
How do we make Personas?
To be perfectly candid, in our current project, I’m part of the backend team, mainly working on software architecture. So while I wasn’t heavily involved in creating personas, I did get to observe the frontend team making them and learned a lot of stuff. If I was tasked to make a persona, here are the steps that I would take.
1. Gather Data
In my team’s current project, our client wants a web application to help parents monitor their children’s growth. We needed data on what our target demographic wanted from this kind of application.
As a junior year college student, I couldn’t really just sit down at a table and think “hmm, what would a middle-aged mother of two want from an application?” to get reliable and accurate data to represent them.
That is why individual and contextual interviews, focus groups, surveys, etc are all very popular for teams trying to make a persona. Empirical data is a must, and the closer your data represents the actual group, the better your persona will be.
2. Decide how many user personas you need
After step 1, you should have a handful of data that you can utilize to make personas. Depending on how diverse the dataset is, you can decide how many templates of user personas you actually need to represent most of them. Too few personas would mean you risk neglecting a portion of your users, and too many of them would just make things convoluted and confusing.
3. Create a user persona template
Customers aren’t just data; they are real people. By making a user persona template, you create a framework that will make it easier for you to make semi-fictional character archetypes, transforming them from datasets and numbers to an actual representation of people that is easier to digest and sympathize with.
Therefore, this template should include:
- Name and Photo: Helps in creating an actual identity. Avoid familiar names and photos; the idea is to create a brand new one.
- Demographics: Age, gender, jobs, etc.
- Background: A quick overview of their backstory, serving as a compressed version of what they are like. Helps in making them more relatable.
- Motivations: Learning what motivates them will make it easier for you to get inside their mind.
- Goals and Frustrations: This attribute’s scope is in direct relation to the direction of your product.
An example of a Persona
As I mentioned, our team is working on an application that helps parents monitor their children. With that in mind, we made a persona that we believe represents our target demographic well.
Meet Sharon Laurensia. Sharon’s a busy mother of two who works as a freelancer and is looking for an app to monitor her children’s growth.
With her in mind, some design choices were made to cater to her needs.
For example, we know that she’s busy because she has to work and actually interact with her children every day. Therefore, we decided to keep our child growth review and child assessment features as concise as possible while not omitting important information. When she has the time, she can go over to our featured articles and videos about children to get a more detailed explanation about her children’s growth and what she should be expecting her children to be able to do at their age.
Here’s another example; Michael Townley, a single father in his early 40s who’s currently raising his first son, Michael jr, who’s 8 months old. Michael is tech savvy and has a lot of time on his hands, and he’d like to read up on how to be a good father as much as possible. Like Sharon, some design choices were made for him.
Because Michael wants as much content as possible, we decided to make a page for each specific type of content; one page for all of the articles, one page for all of the videos, and one page for all the community forums. There’s also a search bar at the top of each page, so Michael can look for a specific topic anytime he wants. This way, Michael has easy access to all of the content we provide.
Also, because Michael has a lot of time on his hands and want to routinely schedule appointments with psychologists and pediatricians, we’ve made it easy for him to do both; he can make appointments with doctors with just a few clicks, which makes having routine appointments much less cumbersome.
Conclusion
While personas take a considerable amount of time and effort to make, I believe it does accomplish its intended purpose, which is giving the team a better understanding of their customers and their product in general.
Keep in mind that making personas isn’t my forte at all at this point, and I wasn’t actually that involved in making the user persona that our team uses, so take everything that I said with a grain of salt. Like usual. Nevertheless, I hope this article gives you an example of how personas are made, and how they help in software development in general.
Thank you for reading!
Sources:
https://99designs.com/blog/business/how-to-create-user-personas/