Basic Overview: Personas - A Straightforward Explanation

Refreshed Article:

Get To Know Your Users: Personas in Design

Designing products, services, and solutions based on designers' preferences has become old-school. Nowadays, it's all about human-centered design and understanding the diverse needs and expectations of users. That's where personas come in - fiction protagonists that help you navigate the complex world of user research.

What are Personas?

Personas are make-believe characters crafted from research data to represent different user groups accessing your brand, service, or product. Essentially, they help you feel the pulse of your users, anticipate their needs, and deliver an exceptional user experience. Creating personas gives you the edge, enabling you to design with purpose and empathy.

Real but Fake: The Art of Persona Creation

While personas aren't based on real people, they're built on solid research. You gather insights from multiple sources, then weave personas that emphasize patterns and commonalities amongst your user community. Personas inject humanity into dry research data, making it easier for you and your team to grasp the needs and goals of your users.

Personas: Your New Ideation BFFs

In the design thinking process, personas are invaluable during the Define phase - the stage when research and findings from the Empathize phase are distilled. Personas serve as a beacon during ideation sessions such as Brainstorm, Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER, pointing designers in the right direction and ensuring that their solutions cater to the target user group.

Four Flavors of Personas

Lene Nielsen, a Ph.D. and persona guru, outlines four approaches to creating powerful personas: goal-directed, role-based, engaging, and fictional.

Goal-Directed Personas: These personas hone in on users' goals and intended interactions with your product or service. They're ideal for exploring the workflow users would prefer, built on the understanding that your product adds value to their lives.
Role-Based Personas: As the name suggests, these personas focus on users' roles within their organization or broader context, ensuring your design addresses their specific needs. Proponents include Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt, and Tamara Adlin [3].
Engaging Personas: These personas breathe life into users by weaving detailed stories, eliciting empathy, and helping designers to immerse themselves in users' lives. They're the artful marriage of goal- and role-directed personas, embraced by Lene Nielsen herself.
Fictional Personas: Created by designers, not users, these personas make assumptions about user demographics based on past interactions and product usage data. Although they may not be 100% accurate, they offer early insights into user requirements, guaranteeing early user involvement in the design process.

Lene Nielsen's 10-Step Method to Crafting Engaging Personas

Forget static, lifeless personas. Lene Nielsen's 10-step process breathes life into your personas - making them active, involved participants akin to members of your own team. The method consists of four main stages: data collection, persona descriptions, scenario preparation, and ongoing adjustments.

Data Collection: Gather as much user research as possible, leveraging Design Thinking's initial Empathize phase to obtain invaluable insights.
Hypothesis: Based on your recent findings, form a hypothesis about common user types within your target user group.
Consensus: Present your hypothesis to team members, validating or debunking it with existing knowledge and insights.
Select Personas: Decide on the optimal number of personas to create and assign a primary focus persona.
Description: Develop a comprehensive persona profile, encompassing details about the user's education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and patterns of behavior. Add fictional personal details and a name to give the persona life.
Scenario Preparation: Create scenarios that depict how your persona engages with your product or service, showcasing its strengths and weaknesses from their perspective.
Organizational Buy-In: Secure team members' acceptance of the personas, encouraging active participation in their creation and evolution.
Dissemination: Share persona descriptions with team members and stakeholders, ensuring they have access to the underlying research data.
Scenario Development: Leverage personas as a foundation for generating fresh ideas and improving existing solutions.
Maintenance: Continuously update persona descriptions to reflect new insights and research findings, maintaining their relevance and accuracy.

Feeling Inspirited?

Download and print the Engaging Persona template to kickstart your persona creation journey with friends and colleagues - available for free on Lene Nielsen's website [1].

So, there you have it - personas are your allies in creating a human-centric design experience, understanding and catering to the needs of your users, and ultimately, building something truly remarkable. Happy persona-crafting!

References

[1] Engaging persona template: https://interaction-design.org/literature/book/personas[2] The Different Types of User Personas: https://www.squadhelp.com/blog/2019/07/the-different-types-of-user-personas/[3] The role-based perspective: https://interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/role-based-perspective

In the design thinking process, personas help guide us during ideation sessions such as Brainstorm, Worst Possible Idea, and SCAMPER, ensuring solutions cater to the user groups they represent.
Lene Nielsen's 10-step method for crafting engaging personas encourages incorporating details about a persona's education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and behaviors for a more immersive experience.
During the Define phase of the design thinking process, personas serve as a beacon, guiding designers in creating user-centric solutions by encouraging empathy and understanding of user needs, while not being based on real people.