Key concepts of personas and user experience

1. The character's role precedes user experience research

Alan Cooper, the father of character, is not the inventor of the notion of personas. This concept has existed in the marketing and advertising industries for decades.

Simultaneously with Cooper, Marketing Director Angus Jenkinson developed concepts and methods for usability studies in the mid-1990s. He had previously proposed the concept of key moments and touch points in customer relationship management (CRM) in 1988, and then first introduced the idea of ​​personas in a 1994 article, Beyond Segment.

Cooper also developed a similar concept in 1995, recommending that software be developed with a mind-set of users who are not specific to generalization.

Unlike personas, users mean something different for different people and are often used to describe average clients. In the user experience area, personas are used to define and design interactive products. Cooper said the characters are extremely simple but powerful.

2. The persona is not a hypothetical customer created by the marketing department

Persona and user have different meanings. The persona is a typical user of the system and is an example of a class of users that will interact with it. Character The character is an introduction to fictional characters based on ethnographic research, investigation or interviews. The best characters have exquisite names and portraits, such as Marcus or Shannon. People and pictures may be fake, but the details should be real.

Personas are not obligations, tasks, or responsibilities. They are typical users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger user base. They direct design and functional decisions on behalf of real users. The characters let you ask such questions to focus on design thinking: Marcus will do the same?

3. The persona is not what the customer likes and dislikes

Personas are concerned with what the user will do, what frustrates them, and what gives them satisfaction. A good character is a story that describes a person's typical day and experience, as well as his skills, attitude, background, environment, and goals. Characters tell us about their motives, expectations, desires, and behaviors. The characters make the user lifelike, providing developers with a specific object to assist in designing the final product.

4. Characters and roles to answer very specific questions

Personas can provide details for important issues that some users can not define.

At some point in the day, what information does the user need?

Do users focus on one thing at a time?

Is user experience often disturbed?

Why did he / she use this product?

What drives him / her to use a product rather than a competitor?

By using the personas to answer these questions, the product design team can actually think from the user's perspective to better meet the needs and desires of the actual user. Personas are not people talking about themselves; rather, they are the observations and descriptions of why a person does what (motivation) he / she does now.

5. Personas can provide very real benefits to user experience research

Personas are effective during the design and development phases. It helps designers focus their attention on user goals by removing focus from the requirements and deliverables. Personas Give the user you are designing a name, a face, and a story that transforms the user's concept into an actual person with their own opinions, feelings, and voices. If you do not know who you are designing for, you can not actually design anything.

Personas can discover new opportunities for improving the website or software experience. Personas Each time a user has a chair at the conference table. It helps to keep end-users involved in the product at all times.

Character roles help:

Define the goals and needs of specific users

Gives the design team a consensus point of concern

Discover opportunities and product gaps to develop strategies

Focus on the design of cohesive objects that represent a larger group

Do not have to cover the needs of the entire user base, greatly reducing the time and cost for obtaining user requirements

Helps designers understand the user's behavior, motivation and expectations with the same attitude (designers can look at issues from the perspective of personas)

Helps to prioritize design elements and solve design conflicts in an economical way

Ability to continuously evaluate and validate designs based on personas to reduce the frequency of usability testing

6 characters do not over-play

If a team spends too much effort and energy creating characters and explores too much from the minutiae of character stories, it istes a lot of time during the development phase, generating tons of vastly useless documents. These over-efforts have made personas a redundant activity.

Creating a good character requires a combination of qualitative and quantitative research, but should be completed within 1-2 pages. It is not a job description. Remember not to tangle with minutiae, such as tasks, duties and responsibilities, so you can focus on skills, attitudes, motivations, circumstances, and goals.

Good point of view, but motivation is better

It is also important to hear what customers say is good for the business, but the danger comes also from being too focused on what the client thinks he or she wants. Many times users do not know exactly what they want, but think about what they want. Even if they really know what they want, they may not be able to express it well. Avoid focusing on motivations by asking opinions (characters are created around motivation).