What are Personas?

These are practical representations of the key features of your audience. They are created on the basis of web analytics and user research. Personas, in fact, are used to characterize a specific, generic user in mind while creating digital products. 

What is a User Persona?

It is a very stereotypical or archetypal figure that portrays a large group of like-minded users and there are no particulars. A document consisting of one or two pages contains several realistic and fictional details about the persona such as background information, a few of his quotes, work-related experience, major achievements in his specialized field of work or goals and job expectations. This resume-type template authenticates and humanizes the persona so it is more relevant to the targeted audience. 

Attributes of an Effective Persona

1. Every detail regarding the persona must be related to real-life research and observation as they are not mere guesses of what the audience requires

2. Must be representative of a major group o your website

3. Focuses on the current state (how a user interacts with a product) and not the future state (how a user will interact with a product)

4. Concentrate on the fundamental needs of the most important user groups

5. Describe real people with ambitions, morals and values

6. Is context-specific and therefore focused on behavioural patterns and aims related to that certain domain of the product

7. Helps uncover universal features and functionality

Benefits of User Personas

By learning the motivations, concerns and behaviours of the chosen audience, website designers can easily focus upon who they are designing the product for. Decisions can be made about site components by the real-world consideration of such conversations. Hence, this is inexpensive and effective in satisfying the users’ needs.

• Empathize with End-Users

Can help designers explore perspectives of real-life people through the design of fictional personas.By recognizing the needs of real users, empathy is a core value for designers to make a product that pleases the user.

Identify the User. When designers consider the user persona while designing, they will be more likely to generate the best product and services for the actual user. 

• Assists in Design Decisions

This helps articulate a product strategy from a user-centered point of view as to what features are considered primary or secondary while creating the product. This can be of service while prioritizing feature requests without the possibility of disputes arising in the designing team. Arguments can be made more friendly through mutual agreements according to the primary person's needs such as one of them juggling a rather busy schedule and is always on the move. Thus, the apps on her smartphone should be designed bigger in size to facilitate ease.  

User Personas help avoid designing mistakes

Limits self-referential design when the designers only consider their own perspectives and needs which may be in stark contrast with those of the end-user.

Prevents stakeholders from designing for elastic users according to their own convenience. These elastic users are very non-specific and may not fulfill the essential demands of the user. 

Importance of User Personas

1. Copy writers can ensure site content is written according to audience’s preferences

2. Website developers and system engineers can know how to approach their task according to the behavioural patterns of the end-user

3. Stakeholders and team leaders can decide on the new site features

4. The overall presentation of the site can be appealing to the audience

5. Help information architects to develop interface behaviour and labeling 

Developing User Personas in 5 Steps

It is advised to only create three or four personas at maximum for a project but attention must be focused on meeting the requirements of the most important end-users. 

Conduct user research

This includes actual field research in the form of interviews or real-time observational data from a large group of people that are representative of the target audience. In case resources are not available for conducting practical research work, the designers can rely on customer support logs or web analytics to create personas. This relates to questions about who the users are and why they are using this system.

Recognize themes and behavioral patterns

Analyze your research work and see if you can group together certain similar types of users. Find characteristics that are relevant and universal to the system and its users. Identify trends which will form the basis of certain group personas. Enlist all behavioral anomalies - which users’ diverted from the overall expected behaviour.

Combine and prioritize rough personas

Now is the time to assemble all the persona’s descriptions and patterns. However, don’t consider too much information as it might be distracting. Creating multiple personas for the same product is also viable since many products have multiple audience user segments. Nonetheless, many personas can merge into each other and take the focus away from designing. Hence separate the personas into primary, secondary or any complementary categories.   

Find scenarios of interaction for user personas

Personas themselves have no proper value unless they are tied up to a scenario. This is an imagined situation which describes how a persona would interact with a product. By attaching personas to scenarios, designers gather requirements and from these they design solutions.

Share your model and gain acceptance from the team

All the stakeholders and team members must have a positive response and impression towards the persona to lead to the implementation of the design. Thus, when personas begin to socialize a well-constructed persona becomes a real team member. It is suggested to use real life models or physical objects for personas to communicate rather than digital versions of documents or powerpoint slides.