Persona in User-Centered Design
What is User-Centered Design?
User-centered design (UCD) is a repeated design process that focuses merely on the user. The design process in UCD involves the designers collaborating with the users through comprehensive research to conduct a suitable product for the users. In this image below is the illustration of the design process that should be implemented when doing user-centered design.
But before getting into the Persona, let me tell you a short story. Imagine that you want to build an FnB business of your own, in this example let’s go with a cafe. In the business plan, for sure you will have to elaborate your target market, which is the segmented types of people that you target to go to your cafe. Am I right or am I right? In this case, let’s say that you want to target Gen Z for your cafe, then you would have to make your cafe modern and young-looking. But you also want to have Millenials come to your cafe, now here comes Persona that can come in handy.
What is Persona?
…defines an archetypical user of a system, an example of the kind of person who would interact with it. The idea is that if you want to design effective software, then it needs to be designed for a specific person
agilemodeling.com
So to sum it all, Persona is an artificial representation of a target user that suits your product. Well, if that’s the case then you have to know your target user first. You have to conduct serious research to be accurate in creating Persona.
Why should we use persona?
Well, after you have read the topics above, it should be more clear why should use Persona. We should use Persona to be clear about what our target users look like, wants, need. We should prioritize the users the most because it’s the users that are going to use our product.
Components in persona
There are many different references if you want to know what components are there in a persona. But mainly it describes the following list:
- Demography: picture, name, age, and occupation
- Goals: the goals that the user wants to achieve when using the product
- Frustration: things that make it difficult for users to use the application
- Motivation: things that motivate the user when using the application
For more detail, here is an example of a persona that I created for my personal project.
In this project, I am creating a donation app for unused clothes. So, in the persona above, I created a persona for college students. The persona that I made is consists of behavioral considerations, motivations, goals, and frustration. The motivations tell you what features will make the user motivated when using your product. The goals tell you what exactly the product goals that are going to be implemented (used) by the user. The frustrations tell you the obstacles experienced by users when carrying out their tasks. Lastly, the behavioral considerations tell you the list of behavior traits that the user has, that might affect his/her behavior when doing a task.
How to create a persona?
First of all, you should know the purpose of the application. From there, you can tell roughly your user persona candidate. In the next step, you should conduct comprehensive research to identify the user. You can achieve this by having an interview with the user. Next, if you already have the data, it’s time to analyze it and see the patterns from the data. Thus, you can differentiate different user persona based on the patterns from your research. Finally, you can make a user persona with the components that have been explained above in the next section.
My team persona implementation
The project that my team is creating is a fintech mobile application. Therefore, for the persona, we created 2 types of persona which are Admin and Members.
