Creating personas

Now that you know more about the users, it is pretty useful to create personas, which are archetypes representing your target or your client's customer, who is going to use your product or service, who we are designing for. As pointed out by UXBooth, a persona is a fictional character to remind us who our users are and it should have its own story. It is important that the story is good enough to make us believe it, so the more accurate this representation, the more likely our decisions will reflect the users' needs.

Although creating personas seems like a simple technique, you can be sure that it is a very powerful tool widely used not only by UXers, but also by marketers, designers, product developers, and other professionals who need to understand their users and customers. The idea here is to create a detailed user profile that might represent your target audience groups. Make sure to have the most information as you can about your users or customers, which can be collected from analytics tools or even surveys, interviews, usability tests, besides information from the sales team, support, and marketing departments.

The persona brings benefits not only for design, but also for the entire multidisciplinary team people:

• They make explicit assumptions about users by creating a common language with meaning.
• Data (largely qualitative) and information are indispensable, being the foundation of people.
• They allow you to focus on a set of specific users (who are not you!) Helping you make better decisions.
• By limiting our choices, personas help in making design decisions. Creating a product for a type of user will be more successful than for a wider audience.
• They generate empathy for users by involving their team in a way that other representations of user data can not.
• Personas are funny and come to life when team members accept them.
  Unlike wirefames and prototypes, personas are not used in a specific part of the process, on the contrary, they help the whole process.

The format and information that will make up the persona will depend mostly on your product or service. A good persona should consider personal aspects such as age, gender, and education level, besides professional aspects such as experience and background. Behaviors will be more related to motivations and needs such as reasons to use your service or product, when and from where they use it, frequency, and so on. Make it as personalized as possible: give a name for your persona, add a photo, set where they live, study, work, and so on.

It is important to understand here what persona will not represent:

• Statistical mean, since the variation is more important than the average
• Real people, because each person has its peculiarities and would not represent a large number of people—but personas are based on real data
• Market segments, because market segment is a group of people who respond to similar messages and not have similar goals and usage patterns
• Job description or functions, because functions are defined by the tasks that people do and not by the goals and behaviors

The fundamental insight of Alan Cooper, who developed this methodology, was that people had goals and behaviors that could be served by products through design to their behavior, thus ensuring greater likelihood of design to be successful. If personas provide the context for a set of observed behavior, goals are the drivers behind these behaviors. Designers can create scenarios and then ask themselves:

• Will this person perform this task?
• Will this person perform the task as planned?

A persona without goals can serve as a useful communication tool, but it has no use as a design tool. The goals you will want to list to the personas can be short notes that do not just point to specific usage patterns but also provide a reason for the existence of these behaviors. Understanding why a user performs certain tasks gives designers great power to improve or even eliminate tasks while still achieving the same goals.

The most important for the construction of a persona is the identification of the main patterns that end up jumping to the eyes when we begin to analyze the findings:

• How the identified behavioral and demographic variables group together to form patterns. Demographic variables only enter if they influence behavior such as age and technical ability
• If a group of interviewees appears in half a dozen of these variables, you can have the basis for one person
• When you find you have identified a pattern, look for others.

In order to set up a traditional persona, the information must be removed from effective searches on the users of the company or the project. But since every company knows at least a few of its users, they have some kind of relevant information about them, even if they have not been validated in some way, there is the possibility of creating a simpler variant of the person, the proto-person.

It is a contour solution for the common persona, that is, it is advisable not to be definitive and that your information be validated with real users later. Both traditional personas and proto-personas help guide the team in most of the decisions that involve the project. The proto-persona is interesting to start introducing the User-Centered Design (UCD ) culture in the company, because it is something cheap and simpler to develop.

As content of the proto-persona, it is interesting that the proto-persona has the following information:

• Who is this user and how is he (personality)
• Some behaviors
• Demographic information such as age and occupation
• And the key point: your needs and/or goals

The layout of the proto-persona may vary depending on the team's creativity. A widely used template is where information is separated into four quadrants, as in the following example:

Keep in mind these characteristics:

• Personal: Age, gender, and highest level of education this persona has received
• Professional: Work experience, professional background, user needs, interests, goals, where they get information from about your issue or similar programs or services, and user environment, and context (when and where will users access the site)
• Technical: Technological devices used on a regular basis, software and/or applications used on a regular basis, the technological devices they primarily use to access the web for information, and time spent browsing the web every day
• User motivation: What is your persona motivated by, what are they looking for, what is your persona looking to do, and what are their needs

The leading product management expert who specializes in lean and agile practices, Roman Pichler, also made available a more simple template that you can use, as you can see here:

Here is what Pichler suggests for each area, as it is on the template:

• PICTURE and NAME: What does the persona look like? What is its name? Choose a realistic and believable picture and name, that are appropriate and that help you develop sympathy for the persona.
• DETAILS: What are the persona's relevant characteristics and behaviors? For instance, demographics, such as age, gender, occupation, and income. psychographics, including lifestyle, social class, and personality; and behavioral attributes such as usage patterns, attitudes, and brand loyalty. Only list relevant details.
• GOAL: What problem does the persona want to solve or which benefit does the character seek? Why would the persona want to use or buy the product?

You can use different templates to create your personas or even come up with your own. If you prefer, you can find online tools such as Xtensio.com, makemypersona.com, or Userforge.com. If you want to do it by yourself, you can create something like this:

Or something like this:

You can also find more examples of persona cards here: https://www.pinterest.com/lisandramaioli/uxdi-personas/

To create a persona, Alan Cooper in his book About Face 3 describes seven main steps: