What Are Personas and How Do They Help Your Team Create Better User Experiences?
Personas are user research artifacts developed to create a shared understanding of who your team is designing for. The people who use the app your team is building or the website you’re redesigning are not you. In fact, they are probably quite different from you. They are likely to have different behaviors, goals, motivations, and technology experience than you and your team members. That’s why developing personas is so important.
A persona is the output of user research, which may have taken the form of ethnographic studies, user interviews, surveys, and diary studies with actual or representative users. Most importantly, the personas you develop were based on research—not guessing.
The personas Voice+Code develops for clients often include the following:
Persona first and last name.
A photo.
Demographic information that is relevant to the product.
Information about what is important to the persona.
What goals your persona has that relate to the product.
What motivates the persona that could influence when and how they use the product.
What behaviors could affect perception, adoption and engagement with the product.
Your digital product will have different personas for each audience or user group that has unique goals, motivations, and behaviors. That means each persona acts differently, has different forces driving those actions, and has different objectives or ambitions.
While the personas your teams create should look like real people, they don’t represent one person from your user research. Instead, they are a representation of the over-arching trends you saw in your user research. The descriptive information you include to humanize your persona—so your team can better relate to that group of users—doesn’t necessarily apply to each and every one of your users. That’s ok. For example, the purpose of saying your persona trains for and competes in triathlons on the weekends is to illustrate that particular audience is intrinsically motivated and has a passion outside of their 9 to 5 job. Your entire audience may not compete in triathlons—what’s important are the commonalities among folks who devote a huge portion of their free time to a passion outside of work and how that relates to their use of your product. On the other hand, you may sell products geared toward the weekend warrior and other products for the professional athlete. It may, then, be important to differentiate those personas, as they have different behaviors, motivations, and goals.
Most importantly, personas help your team identify with the end user. Well-researched personas get team members to start asking questions that the persona would ask and anticipate the worries the persona would have. Internalizing this allows us to create better user-focused experiences. That said, developing personas isn’t always easy. Because of this, we’ve outlined three tips to keep in mind:
1. Don’t create too many personas
Teams who are new to creating personas often want to create many personas to:
Try to incorporate every unique characteristic of the people who use their products or services.
To account for the many reasons someone might have to use their product or visit their website (these are called scenarios, and are developed after personas are created).
Avoid this temptation. Having too many personas makes it difficult to focus on improving the aspects of your product that really matter. You’ve probably heard the saying, “If you try to design for everyone, you end up designing for no one.” If you are developing 15 different personas for your website, you team is not honing in on the most important commonalities among your customers. If they don’t have meaningfully different goals, motivations, and behaviors, it doesn’t make sense to create a separate persona.
2. Ensure your entire team is on board with the personas
If your team isn’t on board with the personas you develop, they’re useless. Instead of creating personas in silos, involve your entire team in the process. If that’s not possible, consider conducting workshops where you present your research findings and the personas you’re working on and ask for feedback. Sometimes an in-person discussion and a few minor edits are all that are needed to get stakeholder buy-in. And, if the team feels part of the process, they’re much more likely to embrace the personas and refer back to them when they are making user experience decisions.
3. Regularly update personas
If you don’t regularly hear “what would [persona’s name] think/do/want in this situation?” then your personas aren’t effective. Your team should be regularly referring to your personas by name throughout the design process. Further, personas should be in a format where changes are easy to make. Often, as you continue to conduct user research, you realize some aspects of the persona were just assumptions—not facts—or that things have changed as your product or the market has evolved. You may also find that, based on new data, one persona morphs into two or two personas are actually one in the same. Most importantly, periodically update personas as you gather more information about your users.
Interested in learning more about developing personas? Voice+Code’s in-house workshops give your entire team the tools to create better user experiences.