Personalized Guide to Personas
Those who have experience in designing any kind of application must be familiar with what is called a “Persona” — or at least the concept of it. No, we are not talking about the video game franchise that shows up on top of your google search for “Persona”, we are talking about what is often considered to be essential in the process of designing an application. Personas serve as guidelines for developers to gauge and determine the acceptibility of their application, especially in the User Experience (UX) aspect.
So, what is a ‘Persona’?
The practice of UX design is based on the idea that successful and frequently-used applications are designed for people, using empathy and known patterns of human-machine interaction. Far before designing our application, the moment the idea itself is born, we have a certain level of understanding of what we want it to do and which part of the population would make use of said application. So how do we design our application to suit the needs of those people? Hiring people for every idea that surfaces sounds very inefficient at best, economically impossible at worst. This is where personas fly in and save the day. No, really, if your application is designed for people with flying capabilities, why not?
Seeing the example above, you probably got the gist of it by now.
Persona is a ‘projection’ of certain groups of people whom opinion would matter, whether as our investors and/or employers who would decide the fate of our application and operate it— we call them internal stakeholders — or as customers from various backgrounds that would judge our application as they use it which would decide its success — you guessed it, the external stakeholders.
Of course, there are no strict guidelines on how to design our guidelines, but some part of the example I’ve shown above are considerably crucial so that our personas would actually be useful as personas, not just some random fictional characters.
Let’s break it down. These components are regarded as essential by Aurora Harley, a User Experience Specialist at the Nielson Norman Group:
- Name, age, gender, photo, short biography/description
Your first thought is probably, “these things seems superficial, there’s no way they’re necessary.” And I wouldn’t blame you, because I thought the same before I experienced designing an interface for my first ever project in college.
For a little bit of realism, let’s say we’re designing a social media application that is meant to operate in Senegal. By providing a name in the personas, we’d probably realize sooner that we need a reasonably bigger space to display the names because Senegalese could have a name like Aliaume Damala Badara Akon Thiam —yes, that’s the Senegalese-American singer, Akon. By providing the age and a suitable photo, we could realize that since they are part of our customers, older users might prefer slightly bigger fonts than what we’d have originally. I could go on and on with examples, but I think I delivered my points that each and every one of these persona components are deemed important by the specialists for a reason.
- Context and experience with the product
Does the user choose to use the application? Is it a required interaction in doing their job? How often will they use the application? Which type of device does the user typically use? Are they used to using a similar application?
Phew, that’s a lot of questions in a short time. If we can portray the answers to those questions (and more) in our personas, we are well on our way to good UX design.
- Goals and frustrations
We’re finally at the obvious ones. Remember that in the end, our application is designed to solve certain problems. We can probably imagine it being the “why” our users use the application. Ultimately, they must have goals that they’d love to achieve, and some frustrations that they would like to evade. If we can accurately depict these in our personas, we’d end up with an application that does both for our users. Now, if that isn’t your ideal for UX design, I don’t know what is.
Hurray! Now we know that persona is basically a realistic depiction of a character that will make use of our application. Let’s just create a complete character, that way we won’t miss any important points!
Personas only need to be realistic, not real, and not necessarily even accurate — as long as they characterize the user base.
Uh-oh. That’s Don Norman, the researcher who coined the term ‘User Experience’ himself. Apparently, too many details can discredit the persona as a useful analytical tool. So while we’d like our personas to be accurate, let’s not write a book about them.
There. We covered Persona 101. As a conclusion, let’s try creating one persona from a certain project that I’m currently doing in my Software Project course in college.
We are designing an application called “Electronic Logbok” for the Faculty of Medicine, University of Indonesia. Since we are designing one persona, let’s restrict what I’ll describe to only what matters to one user type — a professor/lecturer.
There’s actually not much that a lecturer would like to do with our application. They can look at the classes that they teach, look at the students in said class, and approve some modules that the students requested.
So a lecturer from the Faculty of Medicine. So, most likely a doctor. We’ll make it a her, because, why not? Then, to be a competent doctor and lecturer, let’s say she’s in her mid 40s, so not at all technologically-impaired. She’s a dilligent doctor that have a lot responsibilities toward her patients AND students. She’d like to be more attentive to her students, but she can’t find it in her to prioritize them over her sick patients. She just simply not have enough time, especially with students stationed on different campuses. This application is meant to be a saving grace so that she could focus on her patients while still being a responsible lecturer. Oh, we’ll just pick a common Indonesian name since she is teaching in Indonesia.
Say hi to our first persona! Remember, we want to be accurate, not detailed. We want to be realistic, not real. We want to cover a certain user type, not an individual.
With that, congratulations! Now you can create your own personas for your own applications. When something becomes doubtful in a persona creation process, just remember: personas are ultimately guidelines to a quality User Experience.
