Or how to finally stop avoiding personas in your work.
What are personas?
Who are the persons and why do I need them? This question probably arose for every designer at the beginning of his career. So let’s start from the beginning and get acquainted with those dudes.
Personas are documents that describe typical target users. They can be useful to your project team, stakeholders, and clients. With appropriate research and descriptions, personas can paint a very clear picture of who is using the site or application, and potentially even how they are using it.
It’s a great exercise in empathy for user experience designers. You can take out your personas and ask, How would <this user> perform <this task>? or What is <this user> going to look for in <this situation>? This process can help move your project along until you are able to perform more extensive tests
Josh Seiden highlights that there are two distinct types of personas:
- Marketing-targeted personas that model purchase motivations.
- Interactive personas that are modeled toward usage behaviors.
In this article, I’m gonna tell you about interactive personas.
Creating personas
Once you identify your audience and accumulate data to support your personas, your next step is to bring them to life. How many personas you need to create? In general, the minimum is three, but upwards of seven is not uncommon.
If you want to create effective, data-driven personas, you should use no less than three different data input sources, drawing from the following:
What kind of information goes into personas?
The kind of information that your audience will find relevant and believable, that’s what kind. Based on the research data you’ve gathered, you should be able to ascertain what is important to the client, brand, and project.
When creating personas, you need to provide enough information to draw people in and make them relate to the person they are reading about on the page. To help your audience understand how your persona behaves and thinks, be sure to include six key pieces of information: photo, name, age, location, occupation, and biography.
Photo
A photo is the first step to putting a face to your persona. When choosing a photo for your persona, try to make sure that the picture doesn’t look too posed or polished. Personas seem to be more effective with photos taken in more natural settings, such as the photo on the right, where the subject is standing outside in her winter coat, conceivably during her commute. Make sure the photo fits the lifestyle of the persona!
Some of the better online photo resources are iStockphoto, getty Images, and Pexels.
Name
The photo you use will humanize the mix of research data and personality traits, and the name will be how everyone refers to your persona during discussions. It’s a lot easier to remember and associate with a specific persona when you know his/her name.
Try to keep the names you use for different personas on a project from sounding too similar. And, although don’t use the names of coworkers or clients. When you use names that are like or the same as those of people involved in the project, it is easy for them to try to identify themselves in your personas. If you find yourself having difficulty choosing names, some online resources can help you with this:
Age
Although your research should identify the age range of your consumers, providing a specific age for your persona helps to add authenticity to the biography that you write.
Location
It is important to remember that cultural and behavioral shifts can occur from location to location. In Italy, for example, different dialects are spoken in different regions of the country. In the United States, a person who lives in Chicago would most likely have a different cost of living than a person in Savannah, Georgia.
Occupation
Knowing what your persona does for a living helps you to identify with them by relating to the patterns of their day-to-day lives.
Biography
The biography is a compelling story that makes the persona real. This is where you provide details that you derive from your research data and infuse them with a bit of “real people.” You need to weave data, anecdotes, and observation into a story that your audience can relate to.
The biography needs to be believable, and it’s certainly not cheating to bring aspects of a real person into your persona.
Optional content
- Educational level. Knowing how educated a person is can provide more insight into some of their habits. This information can influence how your persona is perceived.
- Salary or salary range. The amount of income a person has substantially affects their standard of living and their disposable income. This information can provide significant insight when you are targeting certain levels of affluence.
- Online activities. There are a lot of ways people spend their time online. Some people pay their bills, some people are heavily into blogging and social networking activities, and some people simply use their computer as an appliance that gets turned on when they need to perform a task.
- Offline activities. Is there additional information about what the life of your persona is like when they’re not online? This element can be every bit as tricky as online activities and can be every bit as important in influencing your persona.
- User goals. You may also want to identify what the persona is hoping to accomplish by using the client, brand, or project. This can help provide insights into the persona’s drivers for using it.
In order to get more information about this I’d like to recommend you ‘The User Is Always Right: A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web’, by Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar.
That’s all for now. I hope that now you are not afraid to create personas. At first glance, everything is difficult, but believe me, you will not be able to live on without creating these beautiful weirdos. You can find even more useful things on my Instagram, Behance and Linkedin.