Persona development can help you know your audience better, their motivations, frustrations, engagement, and more. It is a widely recognised practice being followed within organisations. A user’s persona is studied based on different metrics like age, educational level, goals, challenges, and more.
Personas do not exist for real and are only an imaginative version with its own restrictions and benefits. Hurry! Let us learn more about persona development and its importance.
What Is Persona?
Persona is an imaginative profile or model of the target audience built by using real-time insights and data. Personas are not real users, but they are created using characteristics that involve demographics, personality traits, behavior, frustrations, goals, and more. Take persona as the answer to the most prominent questions for a brand i,e.
| Who is your ideal customer? |
With a simple user persona, you will be able to answer this question. While working on persona development, you will get better insights into what makes your ideal audience who can engage, interact, and probably convert.
- Personas are different variants of users who might interact with a service, product, site, brand, and more.
- When you get involved in persona development, you will better understand your audience, their needs, and expectations.
What Makes Persona Development Important?
Persona development simplifies the complex process of product development and design. It can help collect insights based on different types of users, their interests, behavior, personalized traits, frustrations, demographics, location, and more.
- Clear Insights: With a well defined persona profile, you can understand your audience based on their needs, preferences, behaviors, motivations, frustrations, and more.
- Better Communication: Persona development can help you understand the style and tone of your audience, pushing for better connection and collaboration.
- UI Design Interface: When creating user friendly interface, you can take help of persona insights to design products and experiences to solve real world problems of your users.
- Shortlist Your Target Audience: With data collected from various resources and platforms, you will get to know your target audience and only apply ads to the most relevant people.
- Better Delivery: When you know your customer, their needs, behaviors, and traits, you deliver them true value, which leads to better engagement and satisfaction
In human centered design, actual data is collected from multiple real people and then used to build personas and add meaning to the raw insights. You can check for patterns and understand the main source. You can conduct surveys or hold Q&A sessions to get direct answers to different questions for persona development
Persona Design Thinking Examples
Let us understand persona with some important persona development examples below.
1. Spotify Music Platform
Spotify platform is smartly aggregating its users based on various personality traits and listening habits.
- This music stream platform provides personalized playlists, Discover Weekly based on customers’ behavior and music they love and interact with frequently.
- Also, the trending song list on Spotify is created based on songs most preferred by users on the platform.
- These songs with the most likely views, monthly interactions are listed in the Trending song list.
2. Banking Application Persona
Suppose you are building a dedicated application for older adults.
- A simple and user-friendly design is important, with no complex menus, icons, or buttons
- Large texts or clear steps are easy to follow for adults.
- You can also include voice commands, pop-ups for confirmation, and more
What Do You Need While Creating a Persona?
Personas can include in-depth research of real users or dummies based on the type of target audience a brand or business is focusing on.
- Demographic details like Age, Education, job, income level, location, gender, and education levels, and more
- Main life goals and dreams of professional or personal life
- Challenges, stress, frustration, and fears
- How does your product help users solve their problems
- You need to have a clear purpose in mind to ensure the persona stays relevant
- Personas should be based on real data to give more detailed results.
- Psyocgraphics include interests, attitudes, frustrations, personality traits, and more.
- Presenting persona in a clear visual format is important
How to Build a Persona? [Step By Step Methods]
You can follow this simple five step process to build a user persona, given below.
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- Collect Data: You have to start by collecting information on your target users using high-quality research.
- Research Your Target Audience: The major step is to discover who your users are, their needs, requirements, frustrations, preferences, traits, and more using surveys, internal data, interviews, questionnaires, and more.
- Build a Hypothesis: You have to form a hypothesis based on the research and data collected, including the detailed ways in which users differ from one another.
- Identify Seperate Segments: You can build more than one user persona by finding patterns and dividing your user audience into groups based on different characteristics.
- Establish Number of Personas: After the approval of the hypothesis, you have to decide the number of personas you will have to consider for each product or service.
- Describe the Persona: Personas are based on users’ needs and requirements, which must be able to solve their problem. Hence, it should contain complete details like age, qualifications, lifestyle, interests, and more. You can also add fictional character details confined to a 1-2 page length.
- Prepare situation for Personas: Now, you have to create a situation that shows how the persona can interpret and solve the user’s problem. You can describe different situations for each persona and depict how they can solve problems. For instance, “What are the needs of this persona? What are the situations?
- Get Acceptance from Your Organization: Here, we have to involve the project participants with questions, such as “Do you know someone like this?” where participants can give their opinion.
- Share Knowledge: In this stage, you need to share information with everyone involved so that the team understands who the users are and how to serve them better. This might include outsiders who didn’t participate in creating personas, new recruits, and more.
- Real Life Scenarios: This stage gives life to the persona by bringing real life scenarios into the picture, including short stories that describe how the persona uses your product to achieve a goal. These personas and real-life examples show the real problems.
- Keep Personas Updated: Personas are highly dynamic and must be updated regularly with new data, based on new market demands, patterns, and feedback to reveal new users’ needs.
Different Types of Personas
Check the four major types of personas based on the different factors listed below.
1. Goal Based Personas
This type of persona defines what users want to do with your product, including their main goals, motivations, and methods. The main focus is on what they want to accomplish rather than who they are i,e. Their age, gender, background, and more.
This type of persona helps designers build products that are easier for users to reach their goals quickly and efficiently. For example, if you are building a fitness app, your goal persona would be “ Ankit wants to lose weight, build muscles by tracking his daily calories and workouts on a daily basis.” Now, the way you design an application which can help Ankit achieve its goal in the simplest way possible.
2. Role Based Personas
In this type of persona, the main focus is on what role the user is playing in a team, company, or daily life, and how it affects the products. The main focus is on the user’s role, and data is collected from real-time research from interviews, surveys, Q&A, and more.
It helps users understand what needs and goals users have based on their goals. This persona helps develop a design system or product based on real-world work situations. For example, Ankit, a developer who updates tasks daily, might need a dashboard for easier task updation. Priya tracks project progress might need a tracking dashboard, and more.
3. Engaging Persona
An engaging persona is designed to be interpreted like a real person with emotions, struggles, feelings, dreams, and more. The storytelling practice in this type of persona helps designers communicate with the users, apart from the data points.
The major objective is to understand the exact situation of users to be able to develop a useful end product. For example, an online education platform might present a persona as “Neha being a 26-year-old working mom who studies at night to switch careers into data analytics. She often feels tired but motivated enough to improve her life.” Designers now connect with this storyline to create a product design matching this storyline.
- Flexible scheduling
- Night mode can be a plus
- Easier control options
- Better contrast themes
These storytelling practices help connect designers with users with user-centered thinking, often used to make a persona come alive and talk.
4. Fictional Personas
A fictional persona is not based on real user data but is a persona based on assumptions to help teams brainstorm before the actual research. It is later replaced with the real data insights to avoid any wrong or misleading assumptions. This type of persona development helps in filtering potential users before the actual research is conducted.
For example, if a team is building a food delivery application, then they might create a fictional persona like “Rahul 22, a college student who orders food late at night because he does not like cooking.” This gives the team an initial set of users’ needs before the real interviews or feedback take place.
FAQs
Q1. What is a persona?
Ans: Personas are generally detailed user profiles based on real data, which help design products based on their needs and requirements.
Q2. What is the meaning of persona development?
Ans: Persona development is the process of creating detailed representations of the target audience based on research and data to design products and services based on their interests, needs, and requirements.
Q3. What are the different types of personas?
Ans: Goal based personas, role-based personas, engaging personas, and fictional personas are some major classifications of personas in designs and products.
Q4. How to develop a persona?
Ans: Check the major steps involved in persona development below.
1. Collect data
2. Hypothesis evaluation
3. Deciding the number of personas
4. Describe your personas
5. Prepare the situation for personas
6. Get acceptance from the organization
7. Make adjustments
