User Persona is an important tool for designing and working on User Experience projects. In User Centered Design, we often stumble upon a user persona. User Persona is used as an consideration for a designer to create effective User Interface for specific user type. There are many sites that give user persona templates to be used either free or proprietary. But you should know what does a User Persona have in common.
User Centered Design and its Importance
User Centered Design is a design process that focused on users. The process is done by understanding the context from user prespective and specify the problem and pain points in order to improve user experience on a product. That way, we could see many things often overlooked aspects regarding to usability (how it’s easy to be useful) and accessibilty (how it’s easy to use the application).
There are 4 ways UCD pays off according to David Benyon:
- Product usage increased and reduced customer service cost
- Reducing human error on using the product
- The user felt more respected when using the product
- Recognize diversity of its users for sustainable businesses
What is User Persona
User Persona is a preview of a specific stereotype of a user. These user stereotypes should be large enough to represent a majority of the users. But, this shouldn’t restrict designers to have just one user persona, you create many user personas if needed. The other consideration in deciding which user stereotype to pick is what role the users have on the product. They might be small in quantity but have critical role in the product.
Important Role of User Personas
As stated in the beginning, User Persona is used as an consideration for the decisions in designing User Experience. It also helped the priortization of features throughout the development process. User Personas also could help other stakeholders to create better decision based on the user stereotypes. (hence, the design process is called User Centered Design)
What does a User Persona Contains
User Persona commonly use fictional name and have following info:
- Job titles and major responsibilities
- Demographics such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status
- The goals and tasks they are trying to complete using the site
- Their physical, social, and technological environment
- A quote that sums up what matters most to the persona as it relates to your site
- Casual pictures representing that user group
Sometimes, you might have little time to design and these info couldn’t be fulfilled. The minimum requirement for user persona is that you could explain the user stereotype’s goal, tasks, and pain points related to the product.
The good example is our work on Software Engineering Project subject. Our team is working project on a software aimed to report and save records of students that violate academic rules. We only have 1 week to create user personas for both Student and Lecturer. We brainstorm on information we have about respective stereotypes. Here’s the user persona about lecturer stereotypes, you could see we only wrote the bio, goals, and frustrations. (despite in different language)
In my opinion, this is already a user persona and we could take use information to decide on design decisions.
In the best practice, we gather these informations by conducting a user research, summarize or condense the research, brainstorming, refining, and making it realistic.
What to Ask during User Research
We should generally ask about user’s description, motivations to use your product, and their aim by using your product. If there is a popular product to refer, use it to gain more information related to their preferences and pain points. You should interview more users in order to gain more general information related to a stereotype. The users you asked must be within the scope of users your product aimed for.
User Persona Layout and Formatting
Aside from the template our team used, there are many templates available online. You could use any templates you like, I’m not fond of recommending a certain template. But with this knowledge, you might could create your own template. It doesn’t need to be fancy but it should be readable and could represent the user stereotype well.
Conclusion
User Persona is an effective tool to create User Interface that conform the specific user needs. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to focus on the stereotypes of users your product aimed for.