More about Personas
Essentially, a persona is a model, a summary profile of user types. It is outlined as a detailed description of a specific person; however, this person is fictional. Personas help researchers focus on specific characters rather than diffuse efforts to design for a large number of users.
Personas have become increasingly popular in designing solutions that are user centered than designer. Even though personas do not describe real people, they are based on real data from real people, collected and then collated into a summarized character that has generic attributes of the user type or group, one is trying to describe.
Personas: How to create them?
In the design process, designers will often start creating personas during an early phase so that they know whom they are designing for. When creating personas, the final description was such that it can give an empathic understanding of the user types. Again, the description should include and not be limited to the user’s educational background, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, behavior, attitudes and other recurring patterns. The persona must have a name and the description should be at least a couple of pages to ensure that enough thought was put into creating the persona.
Finally, the participants or users that are being studied in order to derive personas, should be asked at different points of persona development whether the personas getting created are accurate as per their understanding. If the users or the teams involved in creating the personas, see any discrepancy in the descriptions, then changes must be suggested and incorporated until a general consensus is achieved.
Advantages of Personas
1. Human centered
The process of creating and the final personas that guide the design process take into account the needs and goals of the users.
2. Simpler design process
After the Personas are created, they act as the guiding principles for the rest of the design process, making the job of the designer easier as the designer becomes aware of whom they are designing for.
3. Higher acceptance by users
As the design is in accordance with who the users are and their complete descriptions taking into account their needs and goals, the final solution is as close to what the user needs and desires which gets a higher acceptance as a result.
Disadvantages of Personas
1. Generic description & missed details
Personas are after all, a general description of a cluster of users who are grouped together based on their similar behavior, needs or goals. Therefore, not all attributes of each individual user that is part of this cluster get covered. This may lead to an important aspect of individual users getting missed, which may be important to them.
2. Time consuming
Creating personas is a time consuming and elaborate process. Time is require to first recruit users, research users, cluster them and then create personas based on that research.
3. Complex findings
Every user may have different needs, behavior, goals and prioritizing which needs, behavior patterns and goals should be part of the personas and which shouldn’t is a huge task in itself. Also, personas should incorporate exceptions or extreme user descriptions to cover all aspects of users one is designing for.