7. User Personas

Users have unique needs and issues. The challenge is grouping them by shared traits to create representative categories.

Personas

What are Personas?

According to Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. (2016, June 3). What are Personas?. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/personas

😀 Personas are "fictional characters", which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.

They serve as tools to help designers gain a deeper understanding of user needs, behaviors, experiences, and goals, ultimately guiding design decisions to create more user-centric solutions.

Why use Personas in stead of specific people?

Personas Are More Than “People”. Personas are distilled essences of real users.

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

In UX design, personas help build empathy with users by focusing on their real-world experiences. Personas should be based on actual user observations and data, not assumptions.

💡 “Personas are the single most powerful design tool that we use. They are the foundation for all subsequent goal-directed design. Personas allow us to see the scope and nature of the design problem… [They] are the bright light under which we do surgery.”

- Alan Cooper, Software designer, programmer and the “Father of Visual Basic”

As designers, we shape personas iteratively. We divide users into manageable groups and represent each with a typical embodiment – a persona.

Elements to Include in a Persona

Aurora Harley, User Experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group, explains that there are six common pieces of information that make up a persona:

  • Demographic: Name, age, gender, and an image of the persona, preferably including some context in the background

  • A tag line, indicating what the persona does or considers relevant in his or her life

  • The experience and relevant skills the persona has in the area of the product or service you will be developing

  • Some context to indicate how he/she would interact with your product or service (e.g., the voluntariness of use, frequency of use, and preferred device)

  • Any goals, attitudes, and concerns he/she would have when using your product or service

  • Quotes or a brief scenario, that indicate the persona’s attitude toward the product or service you’re designing.

💡 “Each piece of information should have a purpose for being included: if it would not affect the final design or help make any decision easier, omit it.”
- Aurora Harley, user experience specialist at the Nielsen Norman Group

Persona Types

3 Persona Types

Proto Personas

💡 Proto personas are a lightweight form of ad-hoc personas created with no new research. They catalogue the team’s existing knowledge (or best guesses) of who their users are and what they want. - Page Laubheimer, 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical

Why and when we use Proto Personas?

Proto Personas are well suited to teams that are working in a Lean UX framework or have low UX maturity.

  • Make your team’s implicit assumptions about your users explicit.

  • Cataloging team members assumptions provides a shared direction (even if the results don't perfectly represent actual users.)

  • Hypotheses that can be validated with research (or revised once the incorrect assumptions are brought to light).

Qualitative Personas

💡 For most teams, the best approach for creating personas is by running solid exploratory qualitative research (such as interviewing users) with a small-to-medium sample size (5-8), and then segmenting users based on shared attitudes, goals, pain points, and expectations. - Page Laubheimer, 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical

Provides a solid data-based understanding of Who your users are, What they want and Why they want it, is cost-effective, and relatively quick.

Why and when we use Qualitative Personas?

Qualitative personas are best fit for most team.

  • Require a small time commitment and the UX team can gather necessary data in parallel with their other work.

  • Based on user data, accurate and provide key insights about user motivations, expectations, and needs.

Statistical Personas

💡 The most labor-intensive version of persona creation involves collecting data via a survey sent to a large sample of your user base and then using statistical analysis to find clusters of similar responses. - Page Laubheimer, 3 Persona Types: Lightweight, Qualitative, and Statistical

Why and when we use Statistical Personas?

Statistical personas are an option for teams with significant resources, but they require time, effort, statistical expertise.


  • With large sample size, outliers are less likely to be overrepresented in your personas.

  • Help determine what percentage of the total user base each persona represents, aiding in trade-off decisions.

  • Reverse-engineer the persona clustering (using discriminant analysis) to identify which survey questions best predict each persona.

Methodology

The methodology to group Personas

The goal-directed perspective

💡 Defined by personal, practical, and company-oriented goals as well as by the relationship with the product to be designed, the emotions of the persona when using the product, and the goals of the persona in using the product (hence Goal-Directed).

- Nielsen, L. (2014, January 1). Personas. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/personas

It focuses on: "What does my typical user want to do with my product?"

The role-based perspective

The role-based perspective is also goal-directed, and it also focuses on behavior. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources.

💡 The role-based perspective focuses on the users’ roles in the organization - Sønderstrup-Andersen, 2007

It focuses on: "Where will the product be used? What’s this role’s purpose? What business objectives are required of this role? Who else is impacted by the duties of this role? What functions are served by this role?"

The behavioural perspective

💡 The behavioural persona is a tool that aims to integrate the latest findings in behavioural science research with a human-centred design approach to understand the target audience’s goals, needs, and motivations.

- JingKai Ong and Iranzu MonrealShare. Integrating behavioural science and product design: behavioural personas. The behaviouralist. - thebehaviouralist https://thebehaviouralist.com/behavioural-personas/

By taking into account the contextual factors that determine how a user interacts with a digital product, behavioural personas allow for a deeper understanding of the underlying cognitive processes involved in the user's experience.

The methodology to group Personas

The goal-directed perspective

💡 Defined by personal, practical, and company-oriented goals as well as by the relationship with the product to be designed, the emotions of the persona when using the product, and the goals of the persona in using the product (hence Goal-Directed).

- Nielsen, L. (2014, January 1). Personas. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/personas

It focuses on: "What does my typical user want to do with my product?"

The role-based perspective

The role-based perspective is also goal-directed, and it also focuses on behavior. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources.

💡 The role-based perspective focuses on the users’ roles in the organization - Sønderstrup-Andersen, 2007

It focuses on: "Where will the product be used? What’s this role’s purpose? What business objectives are required of this role? Who else is impacted by the duties of this role? What functions are served by this role?"

The behavioural perspective

💡 The behavioural persona is a tool that aims to integrate the latest findings in behavioural science research with a human-centred design approach to understand the target audience’s goals, needs, and motivations.

- JingKai Ong and Iranzu MonrealShare. Integrating behavioural science and product design: behavioural personas. The behaviouralist. - thebehaviouralist https://thebehaviouralist.com/behavioural-personas/

By taking into account the contextual factors that determine how a user interacts with a digital product, behavioural personas allow for a deeper understanding of the underlying cognitive processes involved in the user's experience.

The methodology to group Personas

The goal-directed perspective

💡 Defined by personal, practical, and company-oriented goals as well as by the relationship with the product to be designed, the emotions of the persona when using the product, and the goals of the persona in using the product (hence Goal-Directed).

- Nielsen, L. (2014, January 1). Personas. Interaction Design Foundation - IxDF. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-encyclopedia-of-human-computer-interaction-2nd-ed/personas

It focuses on: "What does my typical user want to do with my product?"

The role-based perspective

The role-based perspective is also goal-directed, and it also focuses on behavior. The personas of the role-based perspectives are massively data-driven and incorporate data from both qualitative and quantitative sources.

💡 The role-based perspective focuses on the users’ roles in the organization - Sønderstrup-Andersen, 2007

It focuses on: "Where will the product be used? What’s this role’s purpose? What business objectives are required of this role? Who else is impacted by the duties of this role? What functions are served by this role?"

The behavioural perspective

💡 The behavioural persona is a tool that aims to integrate the latest findings in behavioural science research with a human-centred design approach to understand the target audience’s goals, needs, and motivations.

- JingKai Ong and Iranzu MonrealShare. Integrating behavioural science and product design: behavioural personas. The behaviouralist. - thebehaviouralist https://thebehaviouralist.com/behavioural-personas/

By taking into account the contextual factors that determine how a user interacts with a digital product, behavioural personas allow for a deeper understanding of the underlying cognitive processes involved in the user's experience.

Key Takeaways

Here's a few things that I learnt from this lesson

💡 Personas are fictional characters whose goals and characteristics represent the need of a larger group of users

💡 Personas are fictional characters whose goals and characteristics represent the need of a larger group of users

💡 Personas are fictional characters whose goals and characteristics represent the need of a larger group of users

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Contents

Personas

Persona Types

Methodology

Key Takeaways

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