User Experience Design: A research approach to personas

Personas (Personas)As a technology that has been popularized since 1999 by Alan Cooper's "The inmates are Running" Asylum, this method uses targeted demographic data to represent different types of users, taking into account the user's goals, desires and limitations, Useful for guiding product decisions, such as product characteristics, interaction, visual design, is one of the most commonly used user-centric design software and part of interactive design, and has been widely used in industrial design and online marketing. such as SAP Company, Microsoft (MSN website), and so on.

There are many benefits to applying personas (cooper,1999):
1. Help team members to reach a common understanding of different user groups. User-related data can be used in the appropriate context, in a coherent story, to help understand and remember.
2. To guide the formation of initial ideas (suggested solutions) through how to meet the needs of individual user roles. Optimizes functionality based on the degree to which one or more personas are satisfied.
3. Provide a "face" to empathize with the personas represented by demography.

A user role represents the target and behavior of a real user group. By describing the character's behavioral patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, circumstances, and some virtual details, the persona has a realistic character.

However, in order to get effective personas, tough user research is needed, as described in "research on personas and users", which requires Sherlock Holmes's analysis and reasoning, as well as objectivity. The most important thing in the process of persona formation is that these users must be important users who can represent the system. To avoid "data vacuum", we need to study real users and identify important features that interact with the site. This requires a rigorous interview and observation, to the user to use the site to care about the user's personal feelings and expectations.

To create a three-dimensional persona, we need to answer the following questions:
1. Biographical, geographical, demographic, consumer psychology background information
2. The relationship between business and personas
3. Personas and the relationship between products and enterprises
4. Specific goals, needs and attitudes of personas
5. Personas ' expertise and proficiency
6. Use of the background environment
7. Interaction, information, perception, and emotional aspects of the user experience
8. Accessibility issues
9. The relationship between personas
In addition, it includes techniques for optimizing user interface components using personas.

The first challenge to creating personas is to find information . Obviously, it's best to talk to users or observe them, but if not, we can talk to user agents, such as experts in the field, trainers, or direct supervisors. People who know the user, such as marketing department, sales department or customer service department. There are other indirect resources, such as manuals, field records, customer feedback forms, questionnaires and so on. But there is a need to be wary of "man-made" users of such resources-the most common parent performer who thinks they know their users but is not.

After you have collected the information, you can rank the priority of the personas by following these types:
1. Core--the main target user of the product.
2. Second-most important-also use products that can be met when they are done, but will sacrifice their needs for the core users.
3. Unimportant-use low frequency, not authoritative, or low priority user.
4. Influential users who do not use the product but who will be affected by the product.
5. Excluded-Our design does not serve them.
6. Stakeholders-creating small personas to represent their interests and relevance. These ranges may involve advertisers, senior managers, industry authorities, and regulatory agencies. This usually facilitates the formal creation of personas.
You can have more than 10 personas, but at least one is a core persona. But if there are more than three core personas, you need to subdivide the product or interface. For example, detach the user's user interface and the administrator's user interface. Making the team agree on the relative priority of each persona is critical to the subsequent optimization of professional design decisions.

What is the background of a persona?

The development of personas began with biographical background, including:
1. Geographical overview. where do you live and work? What about this place? Why does it have an impact?
2. Demographic Summary. information such as age, sex, family size, income, occupation, education, etc., can be obtained from the marketing team. This is rarely useful for understanding personas, but it is useful for accomplishing personas.
3. Consumer Psychology. including social class, lifestyle characteristics, motivation, personality characteristics and attitudes. These are important to understand the proper tone of the product to be given. Adding less-than-essential details can make personas more realistic.

What is the relationship between personas, products, and business?

Some key strategic issues revolve around the relationship and value of personas and businesses.

are personas a user, an employee, or a partner? Some specific information on the site needs to be presented for specific audiences.

What does a persona have to do with a product or business? are they important users or non-users? If you're trying to get users out of a competition, you need to know who doesn't use your product. What is the character's attitude towards your product, brand and company? Does your persona want that kind of relationship, but it's not satisfied?

What is the business value of personas? the more enthusiastic advocates of user-centric design seem to think that all users are valuable, but that is not the case. The 80/20 rule tells us that 20% of users create 80% of the revenue. This helps us think about the percentage of the overall user (or overall revenue) represented by a persona. This may not be the key benefit of personas, but it will help you answer questions from the project's business side.

Personas need to answer the following questions:

What is the background of the product use?
What are the specific goals, needs, and attitudes in the context of what the product provides and what the persona uses the product to focus on?
After thinking about what personas need to accomplish, look at the specific knowledge and familiarity that personas need to accomplish this goal. A safe rule of thumb is that most users never reach the professional stage of "advanced beginners" and they don't want that.
It is useful to obtain specific background information for personas to use products. For example:
1. What is the time and place for the user to perform the task? Who will it be with?
2. What about the surrounding environment?
3. Are there any restrictions on equipment?
4. Is there a need for confidentiality? The need for precision?
5. What are the operational and/or security risks?
6. Is it possible to assist and train?
7. Are there any legal and/or regulatory restrictions?

What is the interaction between a persona and a product?

How often does the interaction occur? Is it an adjustment base? Is it continuous or intermittent? Do you need the full attention of the persona, or do the personas have several other interactions at the same time? How quickly do personas need to be executed? What is the complexity and predictability of behavior? Who drives interactions, personas or external factors? These questions overlap with task analysis, but answering these questions for each persona can help identify important similarities and/or differences between personas.

What information is associated with personas?

Many interactions also involve information that is overlooked in some traditional task analysis that focuses on behavior. So the next step is to take a specific look at the characteristics of the information needed and/or manipulated when personas interact with the product. For example, when designing call center software, you need to consider the volume and complexity of information, how the operator accepts and delivers information, and when it needs to be detailed.

What makes a user memorable?

Although the interactive and informational aspects of the user experience can be logically analyzed, the perceived and involved features of the user experience are more subjective in themselves, but equally important. Products can survive in the market only if they provide enough value. What are the emotions or feelings that attract your characters? What is attractive? What makes people happy? What is memorable?

Once we've refined the personas to this level, it's easier to prioritize the design.

reference materials

Research on personas and users
"Making Personas more powerful:details to Drive Strategic and tactical"
The Using personas and social psychology theories on online marketing campaigns to increase conversion
"The inmates are Running the Asylum"