User personas can be a tricky UX method to use. How does creating avatars that don’t exist yet fall into the spectrum of people that use a certain product or service help designers? The answer to that is research. Before user personas are even created, as designers, a rule of thumb is to never guess your work. User experience design is data driven, so with that said personas should also be based off of data that has already been researched and compiled. “Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. — Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group”. (Rikke Friis Dam and Yu Siang Teo). The main point in creating user personas is to know your user and your audience, as well as empathize with them by understanding their motivations, reservations, and background. One can see how and why this data is beneficial to companies and user experience designers who use this method to generate valuable data.
Being that most developers and designers are introspective and very focused on an end goal, using user personas to understand a consumer group or end users of your product helps to better understand that while a new feature for example, may look flashy or tech forward, it should also cater to the people using your product. If it makes their experience any more difficult or tedious, it is possible the current product you are working on isn’t the best application to use this feature. In some cases it may be the perfect fit but instead of leaving it up to chance why not study WHO the user base is, and what their intentions and goals are while using your product to better enhance their experience. User personas are in a way, akin to standing in front of the mirror and seeing you (or in this case your product design) and noticing things about it that you know are there but haven’t really thought about in detail; A form of self-analysis necessary to understand the user component because the design is meaningless unless it is used, and designed as effectively as it is visually appealing. “But the most important reason for adopting user personas is to ensure that you are designing for your users as they actually are, and as they actually behave. If you don’t, there’s a risk that you only design for some of your users, or that you design for your users as you imagine them to be, or—perhaps the oldest vice in design—you just design the product that you would like to use yourself”. (https://trydesignlab.com/)
When I started working on my user persona, I realized that there is a lot more to think about than just liking or disliking a certain product. Understanding who you are as a consumer is an interesting concept because as you begin to think about the reasoning behind such a seemingly simple idea, you start going down rabbit holes of information that you base your feelings about a product on. What my goals are also make sense and feel like an “Oh, yeah” moment when writing it down and viewing it. Using reddit as an example being that’s the site I used during this project, my goals are clear: I want to use the site to view and consume tailored content. I want to comment/engage with the community about said topics and I want to explore different subreddit communities with topics that interest me. The user journey is clear as well. The user starts out at the home page, they pick subreddit topics that interest them, and they engage with the content and community as their content is curated based on what subreddits they have subscribed to. It’s interesting that in just a split second we are able to know if we like or dislike something based on all of this background information.
To sum up my main thoughts of user personas, I believe that they and other similar UX methods allow the designer to think outside of themselves. It helps us understand that there is a general consensus on every design decision, every little detail that goes into our designs. User centered design should be about seeing users as part of the overall creation of the product, or a symbiotic relationship with design; a constantly changing/evolving digital product.
Resources:
Dam, Rikke Friis, and Yu Siang Teo. “Personas – A Simple Introduction.” The Interaction Design Foundation, www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them.
“User Personas: What Are They And Why Use Them?” Designlab, trydesignlab.com/blog/user-personas-what-are-they-why-use-them/.
Design By Angel Vazquez 