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UX Personas - the logic behind

Persona is a representation of a type of user. It gives a clear understanding of -

  • Who our users are  
  • The type of interaction they will be happy with 
  • The design trends they are familiar with 
  • The theme they will be most comfortable with  
It helps the business align their goals and strategies to the specific user groups.

Before creating a persona, visiting the users is ideal but if that's not possible we can use the technology to meet the goal via video calls, referring to lifestyle posts, videos etc. A persona has a personality, the more your observe and note during these interview the more realistic that persona will be.

To conduct a persona analysis, you can begin by compiling everything you know about your users and grouping them in a table. Use the heading relevant to your areas of study such as -


Or use Affinity Diagrams by organizing your findings on a post-it notes.

This will help us understand the patterns such as the industry they work in, the devices they use, their behaviors, habits, the time of day when they use the devices, and their location. This gives a scope to form questions about our users on what they have in common and how do they differ. Here, find the set of people who can form these questions either from your existing user database or by recruiting them - and then speak to them. It's a win-win situation, you get to speak to the real users, learn from them and make the information available to those who build the product.

You can then add more columns into the table based on your findings such as - office environment, the softwares they use at the moment, the collaboration they do and so on. Look for the shared attributes and predominant clusters, you might find that two of your personas share the same attributes - combine them. If you have different attributes altogether, then divide your persona into two.

Now, it's time for the representation of our persona; it might contain the name, photo, age, goals, technology, habits etc. The important part is that these personas should be distinct and memorable. Once we have the persona we can use it for designing the product for the users with accuracy and confidence.

Our goal is to create a shared understand of who we work for, and how everyone can better serve them. These personas give real insights of our users which helps us design and develop much better products. Always remember that personas keep changing, so create them, share them, learn from them and then re-visit them, and then, begin the process all over again.


 
  

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