Why bother creating personas?
Indeed, why bother?
“How is boxing someone into a stereotype ever going to help business?” ,“After all, we are all complex, and creating personas seems to oversimplify our users.” These are some of the arguments I’ve heard, and on some level, they are all valid.
Creating personas is very much part of many UX processes, and can be used in a variety of ways. I’ll unpack some of this and give you some insight as to how I try to use personas to deliver real business value.
I was once asked… “If I’m selling washing powder, and I have two personas, one, a high level business man, and the other a simple, low level blue collar worker, how is this even relevant? They both still buy washing power to clean their clothes? Who they are, is totally irrelevant!” The real problem seems to be, not knowing why we are creating personas in the first place.
“Too often, Buyer Profiles are nothing more than an attractive way to display obvious or demographic data.”
In my experience, clients often want to drive a project based on business needs — “I want to sell more of my products” or “We need to drive more traffic to the website and increase our ad views”. My belief is, if you can’t align your business needs to your end user requirements, you are going to fail.
Business viability is pivotal to the design and development of any product, otherwise you simply have imaginary customers, translating to imaginary users only for imaginary success.
In essence, personas need to be reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. Understanding who your users or customers are, their goals and frustrations, helps you understand what they are after, and what problems you need to solve for them. This understanding, helps you to align with your customers or clients with the business.
Personas are simply a reference point, and you need to make the information gathered work to your advantage.
Making personas work
The who, what, why and how
If you have ever created a persona for UX (user experience), you’ll know they are often represented on a persona card. The type of data represented on this card may differ from organisation to organisation, or project to project, but typically they capture a persona’s personality, their goals and frustrations.
Taking this information, we need to define how we’ll use this in our project for a more human centered approach.
Knowing who your clients are (the personas), and what they want (the persona goals), you now need to understand their why (the motivations or expected outcomes from these goals). You can then determine how to best facilitate them (creating a feature for example)
I use this formula below for creating my user stories:
As a (Insert persona here), I want to (Insert the persona’s goals here), so that (list the expected outcome for the persona when achieving these goals).
In other words:
As a (Who?), I want to (What?), so that (Why?).
Using the above generated stories then ask myself the how:
How do I facilitate (Insert persona here)’s requirements using the product or service I am building?
This is where I then get creative and ideation kicks in, I start listing all my ideas for each of the whys listed above.
These ideas essentially form the specifications for the end product, taking into account the users needs as well as the business needs as part of the process and aligning the two. If there is misalignment, then you should possibly relook at what you are building, and ask yourself if your product is truly going to be successful.
This is how I create value using personas as a tool. How do you use them in your projects and where do you see the persona exercise adding value to your project?
