All About Creating Personas (March 4, 2020)

This week I had to read three online articles —- all talking about persona.

The first was Nick Babich’s article “Putting Personas to Work in UX Design: What They Are and Why They’re Important”, where he defines persona as a commonly used tool in UX design that targets a specific user in mind when designing products. Babich defines personas as archetypical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. Personas help build up empathy when designing a specific product. They also provide direction For decision making when it comes to designing a specific product.

He details the 5 Steps in Creating a Persona
    1. Collect The Information About Your Users

    2. Identify Behavioral Patterns From Research Data
    3. Creating personas and Prioritize Them

    4. Find Scenario(s) Of Interaction And Create Persona Documentation

    5. Share Your Findings And Obtain Acceptance From the Team

Usually, a persona is presented in a one or two-page document (like the one you can see in the example below). Such 1–2-page descriptions include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and background information, as well as the environment in which a persona operates. Designers usually add a few fictional personal details in a description to make the persona a realistic character (e.g. quotes of real users), as well as context-specific details (for example, for a banking app it makes sense to include a persona’s financial sophistication and major expenses).

I also took a screenshot of an image that explains how persona works.


Generally, when creating a document you should include the following information:
    Persona name
    
Photo

    Demographics (gender, age, location, marital status, family)
Goals and needs
Frustrations (or “pain points”)

    Behaviors
    
Bits of personality (e.g. a quote or slogan that captures the personality)

But hold on, what a second…says a person by the name of anthony(huh?).

The second article takes an albeit different approach and asks the user to throw everything out the window and create newer better personas that skip all the unnecessary bio filter. While both the second and third articles are more lead-ins than actual reading material enticing you to buy their persona patterns product. The author want you to cut down on the fluff and basically reinvent personas by focusing on five essentials, which are to:
    1. Concise snippets of information
    2. Clarity on who the persona represents
    3. Insight into user goals and priorities
    4. Details about their tasks that frustrate them
    5. Details about their tasks that delight them 

To summarize, “No more text overloads, stock photos, demographic minutia, or chart junk. Just the essentials—context, user goals, frustrations and satisfactions.”

I will use what I’ve learned from the reading this week when our team puts together our personas for our InSite research.

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