Persona — To Whom Is This Product Designed For?
If the product had to be created based on user demand, how would we actually know what they needed? The answer is ✨Persona✨.
Persona is a familiar word for a product development team. Persona is a representation of a group of users in a fictional character that contains their goals based on user needs when using the product.
It is easier for designers to find design solutions that can create a user-friendly app experience with personas.
3 Persona Types
There are 3 different ways teams can create personas, depending on the research data:
- Proto personas: Proto personas are based on existing data, team assumptions, and the fastest persona type to get started with. Proto personas are usually created through team collaboration until you identify the right number with the right attributes.
- Qualitative personas: Qualitative personas are personas that are based on small sample qualitative research, such as interviews, usability tests, or field studies. This research usually involves interviewing a group of people about any number of things that might be relevant to the product you’re developing.
- Statistical personas: Statistical personas are created using a mix of a large amount of statistical data as well as similar methods to creating qualitative personas. The team would gather a large amount of data for statistical personas through surveys of your potential users.
Persona Element
Personas generally include the following key information:
- Persona Group (i.e. web manager)
- Fictitious name
- Main positions and responsibilities
- Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status
- Goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the site
- Their physical, social, and technological environment
- Quotes that summarize what’s most important to the persona associated with your site
- Casual image representing that user group
How to create Personas?
- Collet data — gather and use real data about the target audience for personas. Don’t just make stuff up. There are many user data sources, such as web analytics, interviews with users (recommended because there’s nothing better than talking to a real person), and surveys.
- Create a hypothesis — based on the data collected in the first step, create a general draft of the different types of users, including how they differ.
- Segment audience —how many personas are needed for the project? Persona is representative of a larger group of users, but what to do if the customer base is too diverse and expands into different segments? Just create more personas.
- State the persona — to make it valid, describe the persona in detail starting from adding detailed information related to the persona profile with information about lifestyle, interests, goals, desires, needs to limitations, name the persona, describe the persona and add details personal characteristics so the persona is like a realistic character.
- Prepare scenarios — create a scenario that describes the solution, the possibilities that can trigger the use of the product described. Scenarios will be used to better imagine user interactions with products.
Why it is important?
- In-depth understanding of user behavior and needs. By making products according to user desires, a good user experience can be created more easily.
- Clearer and better decision-making. Persona helps designers to focus strategy in product development so that it is easier to determine who is this product designed for and what things are needed from the user’s point of view.
- Persona fits perfectly into the design process. By describing real users, a product designer can more easily understand them.
Here’s the implementation of personas on our PPL project.
Our project, IGRI, is an agricultural platform for farmers and customers.
Based on the farmer persona, farmers don’t have a platform to gain more knowledge about agriculture. Due to this lack of knowledge, it is difficult for farmers to find appropriate and efficient farming methods. Therefore, we create a platform that can increase farmer knowledge with the article feature.
another persona,
Based on the customer persona, customers are difficult to find cheap and quality substance. For example, in other applications, Mario found that the products provided in these applications were relatively expensive.
Not only that, the choice of products in other applications is also less varied. Therefore, we create a platform that sells quality and affordable agricultural products easily.
Personas display the information used to describe groups of users. It can be seen that there is detailed information related to persona profiles with information about name, age, occupation, location, bio, goals, frustrations, and photos so the persona looks like a real character. Goals and frustrations are two important things.
Goals: What is your persona looking for in a product? Do they want something easy to use? A service that achieves a specific goal?
Frustration: What is preventing your persona from achieving his or her goals? What concerns does she have? What are his frustrations with current solutions already available?
Here’s the implementation of personas on my other project.
Based on the persona above, Nurlela finds it difficult to log in to many bank accounts and has difficulty viewing transaction history in various bank applications. In addition, he also finds it difficult to view transaction history in various bank applications. Therefore, we created an application where users can make and receive transactions from various banks and record transactions from each account directly.
Conclusion
After implementing personas, I learned that all the information in personas can help the development team to create an app that suits the user’s needs. By considering the persona in its development, I hope that IGRI can create a good experience and impression on its users.
References
https://www.keepitusable.com/blog/personas-why-is-it-important-to-understand-your-users/
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
