Personas enable the design team to stand in their Users’ shoes, thus, focusing creative effort on satisfying User needs, rather than “pet” ideas of team members or senior executives. By using Persona Analysis as one of the methods of research, the Users’ goals and needs remain in focus.
A set of personas can be quickly developed to represent the needs of many types of Users.
It saves time in canvassing the whole User community to gather User requirements.
Design efforts can be prioritised and evaluated against the personas.
Experiments can be designed basis the personas drawn up.
Besides talking to selected Users, Personas can also be developed using online research, such as their social media profiles, publications and other data driven websites.
🗝️ STEPS
PROFILE THE PERSONA
Select a persona to represent an extreme user in the contextual spectrum of the product or service. Give the persona a title rather than a name. Once you have analyzed a few, you can give it a name and create a composite profile.
SPECIFY THE PERSONA’S GOALS
Think Professional, Personal, Social, Short and Long Term Aspirations - BUT in the context of the product or service you are designing. You can also add needs to achieve the goals.
SPECIFY THE PERSONA’S PAIN POINTS
Think Challenges to achieving Goals, Other frustrations, obstacles, stumbling Blocks, major and minor.
💯 TIPS
Initially minimize the amount of personal details about a persona.
The intent is for the reader to leave feeling like they know this person a little bit more in the context of their research.
Write a Persona to describe each extreme user and if needed persons impacted by the extreme user.
Write the persona as a list of bullet points rather than a narrative. Keep it brief.