Persona: Understand Your User More
Persona is user representation in form of imaginary individual which contains characteristic, experience, tasks, and environments. Personas provide meaningful archetypes which you can use to assess your design development against. Creating personas can help you ask the right questions and answer those questions in line with the users you are designing for. For example, “How would Account Officer and Admin experience, react, and behave in relation to feature X or change Y within the given context?” and “What do Account Officer and Admin think, feel, do and say?” and “What are their underlying needs we are trying to fulfill?”.
Lene Nielsen, a specialist in personas, explain four perspectives that your personas can take to ensure that they add the most value to your design project and the fiction-based perspective.
- Goal-directed personas. In this perspective, you examine the process and workflow that your user would prefer to utilise in order to achieve their objectives in interacting with your product or service.
- Role-based personas. This perspective is also goal directed, but it rather focuses on the user’s role in the organization. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources.
- Engaging personas. In this perspective. you examine the emotions of the user, their psychology, backgrounds and make them relevant to the task in hand. It emphasises how stories can engage and bring the personas to life.
- Fictional persona. It does not emerge from user research (unlike the other personas) but it emerges from the experience of the UX design team. It requires the team to make assumption based upon past interactions with the user base, and products to deliver a picture of what, perhaps, typical users look like
We know now the perspectives of personas, but where do we start in making a personas? There are four main parts to create personas:
- Data collection and analysis of data
- Persona descriptions
- Scenarios for problem analysis and idea development
- Acceptance from the organization and involvement of the design team
Implementation of Persona in My Project
We are using engaging personas. Since the first part of creating personas is data collection, we asked the product requirement design for the software from the stakeholders. From the PRD, we made only made one persona, Account Officer, because the application will only be used internally by the account officers.
The second part is persona descriptions. As I mentioned above, engaging personas examine the emotions and the psychology of the users and make them relevant to the tasks. So, we analyze the behavior, the personality, the motivation, and the preferred channels of the users.
The third part is scenarios for problem analysis and idea development. From the description, we concluded what features that should be available to fit the goals and the character of the users. For example, we included features like agent monitoring, agent validation, and the list of agent that have to be monitored and validated in a day. From the frustation table, we saw that account officers still monitor and validate the agents manually. With the app that we create, we hope that those features will make their tasks easier. Since the data are collected daily, their productivities can also be supervised.
The last part is acceptance from the organization and involvement of the design team. From the description, we conclude the UI/UX design of the application. For example, to solve the problem of using too many papers, we recreate the form that can input all the data needed in the application. After we create the personas, we presented it to the stakeholders and saw if they accepted the personas that we created.
I hope my article can help you understand persona. Thank you for reading my article.
Reference:
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
Panduan UI/UX PPL
My team’s engaging personas description
