Personas: Put a Face on Your Customer

Highlights

• Personas are developed to represent different user types within a targeted demographic that might use a specific product offering. 
• Personas are most often developed as part of a user-centered design process for creating software, online apps and interactive web sites.
• Personas include the goals, desires, and limitations of the user, which are considered when designing the product or web site. 
• Personas are useful in helping to guide decisions about a product, such as features, interactions, and visual design.
• A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a real group of users extracted from actual data (see below). 

Benefits

• Provide a human “face” so as to focus empathy on the persons represented by the demographics.
• Help team members share a specific, consistent understanding of various audience groups.
• Abstract data about certain groups can be put in a proper context and can be understood and remembered in coherent stories.
• Team members’ solutions can be guided by how well they match the needs of individual user personas.
• Features can be prioritized based on how well they address the needs of one or more personas.

Advantages of Personas

Personas are said to be cognitively compelling because they put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers. By thinking about the needs of a fictional persona, designers may be better able to presume what a real person might need. Such conclusions may assist with brainstorming, use case specifications, and feature definition.

• Personas are easy to communicate and help others absorb customer data in a palatable format.
• Defining personas helps various cross-functional teams have a shared vision and understanding of the real users in terms of their goals, capabilities and contexts.
• Personas also help prevent “self imposed design” when the designer or developer may unconsciously project their own mental models on the product design which may be very different from the actual target user population.
• Personas also provide a reality check by helping designers stay focused on the design of cases which are most likely to be encountered (i.e. frequent target users verses infrequent cases).

Include Actual Data 

In most cases, personas are synthesized from actual data collected from interviews with users. By feeding in real data, design teams avoid generating stereotypical users that may bear no relation to the actual user’s. 

For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design.  These persona users are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to bring the persona to life.