Persona — An Unreal Help
So, picture this, you got a request to make a website for students to learn something new everyday on a bite-sized chunks. You then put it up and waited… for several months until you realize it had barely any users.
But why? You ask around and get various response. They say that it’s hard to use or clunky. That’s odd, because you could easily navigate through your own website and find what you want with no problem, surely anyone with a brain could follow the simple procedure. At the same time, your brother would ask you how to install Facebook on his phone and your sister would ask you what’s a Google.
People are different, a lot different. We often take for granted that most people are as technologically advanced as us. A small program might get away not thinking about the users, after all, the userbase is likely homogenous. But once you go into the likes of Amazon, then it became clear that not every user thinks the same.
But how do you design something that caters to users that doesn’t exist yet? The title says it all. In this article, I would like to explain and tell my own experience with Persona.
Persona
What is a persona? A persona is a fictitious representation of target users that includes their traits, goals, expectations, and frustrations among other things. A persona is used to help developers and designers to build a program around the user instead of themselves or just vague requirements.
This individual would represent a large portion of users. There may be multiple personas to a project, each catering to a different style of users.
Elements of a Persona
There are several key elements of a persona. There is no strict guideline on how detailed a persona must be, but the same underlying factors would be:
- Who they are
The first thing that exist in most persona is who they are. Their name, their age, their occupation, and even a short paragraph about them. This element is important for us to be able to understand this persona as a fellow human. - What they are like
Next, a persona needs traits and tendencies. This includes how they normally act such as hardworking, practical, or impatient to what they are like as a person such as how introverted or how objective they are. It could also include they capabilities such as their proficiency with the internet or computers. - What they want and don’t want
Lastly, a persona needs what they expect from the program. This include needs such as wanting a hassle-free system to frustrations such as not wanting to write on paper.
Making an Accurate Persona
Of course not just every person could be modeled into a persona, you need to have data first of your potential userbase for a persona. To do that, there are several ways to gather accurate data.
One is from direct interviews, but this method isn’t as popular as it would need many people to meet together. In place of interviews, we can do online surveys to get fairly accurate data without ever needing to meet face to face, though it would still demand resources and time to process the data.
Another method is to discuss and make an educated guess of what types of user would be using the program. This is done during a meeting of developers, designers, and stakeholders to make sure that the guess is valid. In this method, we assume that certain kinds of people would be more likely to use the program and base our personas on them. This method is less demanding resourcefully and can be done in a timely manner.
The last method would be if your product has already been created by someone, then you would simply need to look at their data and design your persona around it.
The Purpose of Persona
Persona are like a foundation that you can build around. Persona can provide multiple benefits to the software development process, such as:
- Making sure that you are designing for who your users actually are. This means that the features you implement aren’t biased towards you or anyone else, instead serve to make that persona’s life easier.
- Make your product even better and competitive. In the ever growing market of applications, a product may need to stand out by catering to specific niches. Persona helps a lot to make products stand out more.
- Giving you more sense of accomplishment as you see those people that you design the product for gives positive feedback. Or if they do give a negative feedback, you can more easily adapt around it knowing what they’re like now, cutting development time.
Our Implementation
We created one persona for our product. Our product is an inventory management system that is used only by the employees of Ernst & Young. This means that there is only one type of user, and that is Ernst & Young employees.
Their employees would need to be workers of the data forensic field, making them more tech oriented. These personnel would image hard disks and back them up into other hard disks. They would do note down which hard disk goes where on an excel for every project, which is becoming cumbersome to do.
Steven wishes to have a centralized database to manage the hard disks he used on different projects. He wants an easy to manage and easy to search catalogue of hard disks. And he would like to have hassle free input, moving from spreadsheet to digital in a click of a button.
How this helped us
This persona enabled us to imagine what Steven would want. First of all, Steven would have all these spreadsheets that would need to be imported. So we know to make the process of importing fast and easy.
Steven would also want to be able to quickly search up the database for a certain hard disk. We fulfill this by designing a search bar most pages to quickly look something up instead of one by one.
Conclusion
We have explored aspects and the benefits of persona. But do you actually need persona in your project? The answer may vary. Persona takes a small amount of the project time compared to other helpful things. If your project has time and resources to spend, it is a good idea to make persona.
A persona shines the most on a product concept that hasn’t been done before, as it helps the developers be more confident that their features are hitting the right marks of their users. Even if your product isn’t exactly brand new, implementing a proven concept wouldn’t hurt.
All in all, persona is a good tool to help you develop a more user-centric product, especially in a big team. It gives more benefit than it takes resources away. Thus, I would say that creating a persona is highly recommended for most projects.