User personas are a helpful approach in UX design. Personas are about designing products with a precise, rather than a general purpose, individual in mind.
Personas' utility in defining and designing digital products has grown in popularity in recent years.
In this blog we will cover the following topics:
- What is a user persona?
- Importance of user personas
- 7 User persona best practices
- User persona in the design process
- Steps to create the best user personas
What is a user persona?
A user persona is a report of user research based on a typical imaginary fictional characterization composed of all the user and their actions.
Instead of building products for millions of users, businesses can create user personas which are the common traits of average users.
User persona report consists of standard behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and demographic information, this gives an understanding of what kind of customers are interested ad relevant to your products.
Importance of user personas
User persona can be useful in many odd ways to many professions, especially product teams and design teams.
#1 Make data-driven decisions:
Decisions on your product or interface can be risky and challenging from the budgeting and user experience issues.
Whereas company is now growing too advanced that they do not come forward to make decisions or implement plans immediately without prior ideas, prototypes, or analyzing failure experiences.
This user persona is just one of the elements that help build better prototypes.
User persona report does provide both qualitative and quantitative data on an ideal targeted customer.
Getting an outline of how your single real face to face behave and interact is way easier than getting a bulk of excel data with demographic information on your targeted audience.
Imagine you sell to that one user persona and that makes your work 50/50 with a more broad view of user interaction.
#2 Simplify research findings:
A research report on more and more bulk data is going to definitely bring your headache back.
A user persona is an easier one-page report on how and what your customer is.
These reports are easier to analyze, get an impression on your exemplar customer, and easy to share.
This one-page user persona research report that is more similar to that resume of a person.
You can know and understand the following data with user persona:
- Demographic data
- Interests
- Psychographic data
- Schedules or daily routines
- Customer perspective on the product
- Need and want
- Financial details (affordability)
#3 Understand end-user issues and pain points:
user persona gives an elaborated view of user experience on their priority tries on the product or other competitors.
Convincing a user persona who already has used a similar product and is still interested in a related product.
With user persona research and other teams can come to a conclusion customers prior experience and their pain-points during the experience and why they are seeking a similar product or its competitors, this gives a way to clear sight by extracting customers.
Examples:
You sell a video drive containing effective workout videos.
Your user persona is a gym freak who actually stopped going to the gym due to many reasons like crowds or sexual comments.
Here comes your chance of giving a try to that targeted customer by marketing to them by saying, "we provide video drive with 30 days challenge video that is more effective than a gym trainer. It can be done in your private space and more in your way".
This can definitely convivence your customer by considering their privacy and security.
Example with software:
Imagine you sell a software product that trims video.
Now the pain point is a social media marketer who keeps playing around with videos and recordings.
Now she has been using a video trimmer that has been kept giving an irrelevant error pop-up during download and she has been finding difficulty with identifying a annotate button where this particular button is kept smaller compared to other buttons without considering the user experience.
Now you can provide an easier solution to your customer convince them with a free trial of downloading a limited download with no error pop-ups and a visible annotate button.
#4 Stabilize empathy
One of the main principles of every designer is to be empathetic where every designer need to put their foot in their users.
Here is the simpler term, a designer cannot keep designing or changing the design according to every different type of user.
But to minimize the work by taking an average calculation on how users behaves and why they behave in such a way is what we call a user persona.
A user persona is one face profile will millions of face characteristics combined. The only goal is to provide a better and more usable product to each and every user.
#5 Prevaile behavior patterns of users:
Understanding and predicting the user behavior pattern is just 40% of achieving your conversion success.
Using psychological triggers to attain and unconsciously help your users to convert.
User journey can be similar to webpages path and cursor gestures.
User persona can include and guess the common or major way of user journey too.
User persona best practices
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Demographic data: On the foremost header part with details on name, age group, geographical location, gender, ethnicity, occupation, and more.
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Image: Adding an image of any licensed common person's photograph related to a judgmental conclusion of including characteristics.
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Psychographic data: Data on habits, daily activities, values, challenges, dreams, behaviors, and interests can be mandatory as only this information can give an idea and conclusion in understanding the user persona.
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Goals: The key potential factor to come up with best product design and development solution is to know what you the user persona and this characterized person going is to have goals in their life on both short-term and long-term bases.
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Frustrations: Frustration or pain points that your user often faces are more important than goals as you are the one that going solve their frustration on using your competitors or manual working.
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Minimal texts: Minimizing text-level ads including more analytical data and icons or images of brands or activities can help understand with a glance than reading the bulk amount of content.
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No bulk data: make a unified design of your user persona report which as to be easier to carry and analyze. Page designs are the best option to provide user persona reports, it all depends on the design and arrangement of the data.
User persona in the design process
Design process has 7 steps where the user persona is done before the prototype and ideate as user persona plays a major impact on prototype designs.
A user persona is generally built during the define step, as user persona itself is an outline of your customers.
Steps to create the best user personas
#1 Data collection
Data collection on most of your users is the basic and unavoidable step as this is the one and only way to collect data on your customers.
Precise personas are derived from user interviews and observation data of real users.
It is critical to gather as much data and understanding about individuals as potential by interviewing and observing a large enough amount of individuals who reflect a target group.
The more a researcher observes and records during these interviews, the more accurate the persona will be.
#3 Research
The major step is to analyze the research findings.
The objective of the research is to discover behavioral patterns in user research data that allow similar users to be grouped together into different types of users.
Differentiate both qualitative data and quantitative data from the collected data to analyze common and similar outcomes.
#4 Analyze and prioritize
Analyze the whole outcome of your research and make a unified average of data out of it to make one specific output for your user persona.
Prioritizing bulk data of both qualitative and quantitative data, so let your user persona not have any kind of invaluable or irrelevant details.
Whereas everyone is unique here, each people have something special and you don't have to get confused about which data to prioritize.
You can prioritize only common and average persona which are really important and valuable in your design process.
#5 Build user persona report
And then voilà you came to the end point of your process of building user persona, al you have to get your software and design a beautiful user persona that is understandable and scannable.
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