The offerings of any business by and large depends on its audience and their needs. The end-user is the most pivotal element in creating your product or service. UX personas are important for you to know who your user is. Thanks to user research and analysis of basic customer experience metrics, you can pinpoint who your ideal user is and, based on this knowledge, create a real user with real problems and real needs. 

Persona is a simple tool to create your product with a specific target user in mind rather than a generic one. It’s a representation of the real target audience data, gathered in previous research such as user interviews. In other words, a representation of your most common target audience. It’ll help you standardize needs and get solutions faster.

As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based upon the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice within many human-centered design disciplines to collate research and personify certain trends and patterns in the data as personas. Hence, personas do not describe real people, but you compose your personas based on real data collected from multiple individuals.

Why Create UX Personas?

Well, there many reasons to do so.

• To know who you are creating the product for.
• For identifying the basic problems and needs of your audience.
• To better focus your team’s efforts on creating a usable product.
• To understand user’s motives and ways of interacting with the product.

There are different perspectives on UX personas. According to Ph.D. and specialist in personas, Lene Nielsen, there are four perspectives that your personas can take to ensure that they add the most value to your design project. 

1. Goal-Directed UX Personas

A goal-directed persona answers the most basic yet critical question – What does my typical user want to do with my product? The key objective is to examine the process and workflow that your user would prefer to utilize in order to achieve their objectives while interacting with your product or service. The goal-directed personas are based upon the perspectives of Alan Cooper, an American software designer, and programmer who is widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic”.

2. Role-Based UX Personas

The UX personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources. The role-based perspective focuses on the user’s role in the organization. An examination of the roles that our users typically play in real life can help inform better product design decisions. Where will the product be used? What’s this role’s purpose? Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt, and Tamara Adlin are advocates for the role-based perspective.

3. Engaging UX Personas

The engaging perspective is rooted in the ability of stories to produce involvement and insight. Through an understanding of characters and stories, it is possible to create a vivid and realistic description of fictitious people. These personas examine the emotions of the user, their psychology, backgrounds, and make them relevant to the task at hand. One of the advocates for this perspective is Lene Nielsen.

4. Fictional Personas

The fictional UX persona does not emerge from user research but it emerges from the experience of the UX design team. It requires the team to make assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base, and products to deliver a picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like. There’s a substantial risk that these personas can be deeply flawed. That’s why they should be considered as a rule book to create your products and services.

How To Create a UX Persona?

Step 1: Dig Deep Into Your Data

The first step is to take a closer look at your data gathered in Discovery Phase, mainly User Interview. Tag your most essential insights, primarily problems. If you work with a client, you should also account for your stakeholder point of view. A persona should reflect business goals, as well. Both the needs of users and businesses are crucial to creating a balanced and successful UX Persona. In some cases, you won’t have time or money to interview target users. It’s still possible to create Persona based on your stakeholder insight and competitor analysis.

Step 2: Identify Patterns And Form a Hypothesis

Once you gather some data to analyze, it’s time to identify trends. It’s time to take a closer look at tagged data to see if overlap emerges naturally. At this point, you should understand that different groups of people have a novel approach to the subject.

Based upon your initial research, you will form a general idea of the various users within the focus area of the project, including the ways users differ from one another

Step 3: Create a UX Persona

When you start creating a persona, don’t forget to give them a name and upload an image that represents them. It’ll help you to build their virtual identity, and will be easily recognizable by your team. Each persona should have a unique name. It gives it a rational fraction and will help to bring the persona to discussion or any other research material.

You must add a description to your personas. It should include the background of your fictional character, as well as their current desires. What is their primary motivation for using your service or tool? It should consist of several goals and the desired outcome of the user’s actions. Every persona represents different problems. Add all of them to this section to have a summary of the personal struggle.

Step 4: Share Within The Organization

Persona has no value if it’s not distributed well within your organization. All your team members should be familiar with your primary Personas. It will help you be up to date with the main problems for your target users and how they differ within disparate groups.

Conclusion

Personas add the human touch to what would largely remain cold facts in your research. When you create persona profiles of typical or atypical users, it will help you to understand patterns in your research, which synthesizes the types of people you seek to design for. Reach out to our experts to learn more about creating personas.

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