I’m going to start things off by telling you a little secret: I wasn’t a big fan of personas when I started out learning about UX design. I always thought defining the target audience was enough to get started, and I actually still stand by that for the most part.
But I have warmed up to the idea of user personas and learned how to use them effectively during the multiple stages in the design process. So for the second part in this series, I’m going to tell you how I created the user personas for my app idea and more importantly, how I plan to use them.
Guerrilla research
I started my app idea from a problem I encountered in my own life. So the first thing I needed to do was validate whether this was an actual problem that enough people encountered.
I spoke a lot about it with my closest friends. Our friend group likes the occasional night out and as is the case with any group, you have some people that take most of the initiative and others who like to follow along.
But I wanted to look broader than my own friends. And I had the perfect plan: just show up at random nightlife activities and ask people. True guerrilla research that had me paying for their drinks while I asked them the basic persona questions as well as more product related questions like how frequently they went out, what their typical night out looked like, how they decided which party to go to, etc.
How to use personas effectively
My user personas are following a fairly common structure. This means a short biography, personal information and a straightforward quote, but also a character sketch via some personality traits, motivations/needs, and frustrations.
I personally like to put a familiar face on my personas and tend to go with celebrities for this. Normally you shouldn’t pick familiar faces to prevent preconceived ideas. But I think you can get away with it as long as either pick someone who fits the persona, or go for an actor because you are already used to seeing them play different roles anyway. And it makes for an easily recognizable and memorable persona, while also lifting the spirits of everyone talking about these personas.
But we’re not here to talk about how to create your personas, we’re here to talk about how to use them effectively. So let’s get to it.
→ Ideation
So the obvious option is to use your personas during ideation. You don’t build a product for yourself, you build it for your users. And your personas are a tangible representation of your target audience.
- User personas give you boundaries to work within. They offer you context to build your ideas around.
- My personal favorite exercise/workshop during ideation is mixing and matching ideas, combining the good points from different ideas to come up with a final solution. And user personas can definitely help give you perspective during this exercise.
- Some personas represent of a bigger part of the target audience, while others are more suitable for embodying edge cases. So personas can also help with the prioritization of feature development.
→ Stakeholder communication
But a UX designer’s job doesn’t start nor end with ideating and designing an experience. By far my favorite use case of personas and scenarios is during stakeholder communications.
- Just like how personas can help you with prioritization during the ideation phase, they can also help you with prioritizing which people to target in marketing campaigns.
- User personas coupled with scenarios are a great tool to use in your marketing campaigns. Using relatable people in recognizable situations helps getting people’s attention. You’re solving a real problem and scenarios help visualizing this value proposition.
- Scenarios can also help with explaining the value proposition to investors, managers, etc. It can be a tool to visualize certain steps in the roadmap and set the vision for the product.
Thinking about my own app-idea specifically, we are prioritizing the student user personas for the initial product. This persona and specific scenario show a growth opportunity beyond students.
Concrete, this means we will look into partnering with tourist hotspots or travel agencies to get our product to more users.
Conclusion
Product design is a continuous process where the product is updated in an iterative way. So like most research related things, and if you like to use personas, it’s important to update them regularly as the product evolves. This way you make sure they stay up to date and representative of your userbase.
Feel free to let me know if you like to use personas in your design process, how you use them, and what you want me to cover next.
That’s it for now, I’ll see you in the next one.