User research: Effective use of personas

Developing user research can find some amazing and deep needs ... But how do you communicate these findings to other people in your team? This is where the user role can intervene, and the effective use of personas can convey the results of the user's research, and in this way the results can be used throughout the design development cycle.

Why do you have a character?

The first step in the user-centric design process is to conduct user research. Through these you can study your users-their behavior, attitudes and needs. The question is, how do you pass her to the other members of your design/development team When you get some interesting, useful, rich data? To provide a very popular practice, that is the user role.

User roles are a common technique for delivering user research results, and are a simple, easy-to-understand approach. They are very useful and they can make this information very strong in a very quick and interesting way (if done well)

communicated to the design and development team throughout the process to ensure that the entire project to consider user research. User roles are popular because of the humanization of the data that users study. He gave us a real face, not some tedious data from user research.

What is a persona?

Persona is a necessary virtual character, he is based on the early development of user research data generated. There should at least be a persona to represent the users of your main section. This word is mainly used in the ideal state, you should use 3-5 personal roles, and most sites use more user groups. Each person's role should have his own personality and significance, and put too much information on the character, they will become blurred into a person. With more than five character roles, it is often confusing for people to begin with.

What information should be available for persona settings.

Personas take many different forms and sizes. The information they contain depends entirely on the basis of the personas the user has studied, the information requirements of the design research team, and how these personas will be used.

Most personas contain a description, a picture, and some of their simple needs/goals:

Pictures are not commonly used, because they can help people to specific characters, so that he becomes real. They also help designers/developers to more easily empathize with these personas.

A brief description of the persona, often containing demographic information (sometimes with a surprising amount of detail). These descriptions mainly include (in the middle of other information) their work, their technology, some of the pressures they assume and the locations where they use these systems/sites.

Requirements, goals, and characteristics can be directly listed under each individual role, or form a table to compare the possible needs/characteristics/goals of each individual's role. This can help define features that need to be prioritized (or features that need to be developed) before the start of research and development.

Personas may include a variety of related information, mainly including:

A reference to a persona

This requires a simple sentence outlining their needs/objectives. This is a double-edged sword, the risk of this simple sentence is too simplistic the problem of personas. References also have the added benefit of giving personas a deeper personality.

Setbacks

This refers to the problems encountered by personas, possibly due to the existence of the system or the absence of such a system. This allows designers/developers to identify the biggest problems these personas face.

The ideal characteristic

This is a very similar feature, but it does not limit its viability ... These may not be possible, but sometimes they can help designers/developers think of alternative ways to make them more realistic.

Need to know.

Any information is needed when trying to achieve their goals. These help designers/developers to understand key information needs by communicating with users.

Behavior

These are typical behaviors of the user role columns. They usually only show different needs/requirements in the system development caused by different behaviors of personas.

Scenario Description

These are examples of what personas might do. They may be based on their goals or a system that already exists. It's perfectly clear what this system is/how to use it.

What can I do with the characters?

The whole purpose of personas is to deliver user research and ensure that it is remembered and used throughout the life cycle of the project. To make these happen, the design/research team must use personas. How to use it accurately between different companies. The most common solution is to post personas to the design/development team after the first time. In any case, this is a good way to increase the impression of a persona, a company that gives his company employees a fast flash memory card, so they can refer to personas wherever they go.

There are many more ... Alternative methods are available. Other companies even cut out an original size persona, and at the meeting

Leave a seat for them.

When people begin to call their names, these characters have been accepted, become clear, "David does not want to do those" ... Other people don't ask who is David.

When personas are accepted, the design/development team should be able to design and build for personas, who are users. In this case, their design and construction will take into account the personas previously studied by the user, and not even on the basis of implementation.

Conclusion

Personas are a good way to refine user research to make it easy to understand, small form. They include a wide variety of information, tailored to the needs of specific projects and teams.

For whatever purpose, they must be used and used. If they are degraded to the background, or are only paid attention to in the presentation of their meetings, the effort and devotion to user research and the personas created are wasted.

Author Introduction:

The author of this article is Alistair gray, who is the consultant of user experience consulting, the usability of the website. Alistair is keen to improve the user experience of the site and is committed to implementing a variety of user experience projects, including information architecture and interactive design.

translation: UPA editorial team-Mo Yan