Personas Make Users Memorable

User-centered design means that designs are informed by user thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, needs, and goals. But that can be easier said than done when users feel like generic and undefined entities. Personas create a memorable representation of real users based on concrete research.

Definition of a Persona

A persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product. Personas help product teams empathize with users.     

Personas are powerful UX deliverables that take advantage of the human tendency to be more captivated by concrete instances than generalizations. Where user groups or market segments are often presented as number ranges for various attributes, personas synthesize that data into a single, fictional user.

An effective persona will feel like a living user and contain details relevant to a real human, like:

• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Behaviors
• Needs, concerns, goals

Creating Personas

The Research Phase

Personas must be based on user research to accurately represent a product’s users. Personas might be made-up people, but they should be based on information about real people.

Ideally, personas should be created as early as possible in the design process and be part of the research phase for a product or feature. Some possible research methods to define persona characteristics include:

Once user research has been completed, personas and scenarios can be derived from that data.

Persona creation is best done as a team: those people involved in the process will be more likely to believe in them, use them, and promote them to others.

The Creation Phase

Begin the persona-creation process by identifying characteristics of users observed from research. As you group these attributes into clusters, they will begin forming clear characters. If several seem too similar, merge them together or eliminate any groups that appear less relevant to the product or business. Once distinct roles emerge, add specific details to make the character more realistic, believable, and memorable.

Common pieces of information include:

• Name, age, gender, and a photo
• Tag line summarizing their character (Avoid getting too witty, as doing so may taint the persona as being too fun and not a useful tool.)
• Experience level with your product or service
• Context for how they would interact with your product: Through choice or required by their job? How often would they use it? Do they typically use a desktop computer, their phone, or another device to access it?
• Goals and concerns when they perform relevant tasks: speed, accuracy, thoroughness, or any other needs that may affect their usage
• Quotes to sum up the persona’s attitude

While your goal should be to create a believable character, don’t add details that are irrelevant to the design. This can be a tricky balance to strike. A name and photo may seem irrelevant, but their function is to aid memorability, which is the primary job of a persona. On the other hand, unessential details can overwhelm the relevant ones and make them harder to remember.

Thus, 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, remove it. For example, identifying a persona’s favorite wine wouldn’t help when designing an intranet, but could be very useful when designing a forum or marketplace for sommeliers.

Why Personas?

Successful user-centered design needs team members who empathize with users and are willing to develop something that will work for them. But when users feel like a vague collection of people, it can be hard to keep their needs tangible and at the forefront of designs — statistics don’t stick in people’s minds the way a specific persona does.

By focusing on a singular individual — or a few individuals, if using multiple personas — designers can foster empathy for users and resist the temptation to design for everyone.

Personas also create a common, precise vocabulary for describing a certain type of user. In meetings, the persona’s name acts as shorthand for the full set of attributes, desires, and behaviors that must be considered when making design decisions. Instead of every team member having a shifting and unique idea of “the user,” a persona gives the team an easily pictured set of users.

Ongoing Benefits of Personas

Strategizing and making design decisions are the main uses of personas; however, they can be used beyond the design phase. Even if personas were not created at the beginning of a project, it’s still worthwhile to create them for these later activities.

When working with an outside agency or consultants, clearly defined personas can be used to describe your target audience concisely and effectively. Or, once a design is created, personas can be used as a guide for expert reviews: An expert could consider how each persona would perform a specific task or interact with a UI to determine potential issues. (But don’t let this replace user testing!)

Personas could also serve as participant templates when recruiting participants for usability studies. Common traits across several personas or a persona’s distinct characteristics might be useful screening criteria for some, if not all, of your study participants.

If the website or application is already live and running, personas can be used to segment analytics data, in order to evaluate how various user groups behave and use the product. These segments are not only useful in reducing the amount of data to analyze at a time, but they also support the ongoing validation and refinement of the personas as living documents.

Conclusion

Personas are a foundational deliverable that foster empathy by providing a memorable description of your user audiences. While there can be some real hurdles to team-wide adoption of personas, these don’t diminish the enormous benefit they bring to streamlining user-centered design.