Improve User Experience with Personas [Infographic]

In the world of future UI design trends for digital products, personas play an important role as a technique in the hands of the UI/UX designers. User experience is a metric that has evolved in recent years for websites or mobile apps. 

Out of the many data on user experience, we explored some and found the following: 79% of people when they don’t like on one site go back to search on another site. 

In the words of the Nielson Norman group a good user experience can be interpreted as “the exact needs of the customer, without fuss or bother”. User experience can be more appropriately termed as something that obliges the wants of the clients. It is, in fact, a seamless amalgamation of multiple services, engineering, marketing, interface design and graphical, etc. 

Personas have gained importance among the designer community, for quite some time now. These are techniques adopted by designers and are fictional characters to understand the types of users, their needs, goals and what is not interesting?. It analyzes users and builds empathy with the target audience. 

They gain insights on user journeys and move into the prototype tests. However, the designer first chooses user groups and then only arrives at the personas.

Personas depict profiles of ideal customers and enable you to understand a few things about your customers such as behavior, pain points, etc. It eventually guides the designer on products and designs that sell themselves. 

However, it never means that you avoid talking to the real user. Understanding the pain points of your target audience is the most important thing that impacts the design process. Personas allow the efficacy of the design from the user’s point of view. The designers make personas through an iterative process.

Here are some of the steps to follow for drafting a user persona:

Before understanding the users, you must take help from a screener based on demographics, psychographics, etc. With an existing user base, a source of data already exists. In the absence of source data, surveys are conducted for getting further insights. For the new companies, with no user base, users are taken from competitor’s data. 

Obtain homogenous data from all users through interviews. Ask relevant questions within a short timeframe. The persona created out the right kind of questions acts as the best proxy. Asking the right questions only helps in getting a voice during product development. 

Arrive at trends even with a small number of participants. It is important to gather enough information from the interviews. You can continue until all patterns are unearthed. 

There is a need to work in a collaborative manner with another team member, gathering insights missed by you. The location where the interview takes place also matters. You gain empathy with direct interaction. Second personas can create provisional personas. 

Finding patterns out of the data collected is an important step. It is possible to segment and group similar users with roles. But roles are not the same as personas. Roles get defined by the tasks performed. 

Capture the important traits in a persona out of the behaviors that characterize each research group.  A detailed document for each persona is prepared to contain information on demographics, photos, a regular day handling the system, etc. 

Convey them with the documents and share them with others in an engaging fashion.  

The primary reason to use a persona for the design process is to resolve user problems. The more the persona gets closer to the actual user, the higher are the chances of rendering a delightful user experience. It serves the purpose of a product that serves your ultimate business goals. 

When multiple stakeholder’s views need to be prioritized, then personas assume importance. They come up with common pain points and frustrations.  

Obtain User Understanding 

The user groups participate in many useful discussions to arrive at a detailed understanding of the user. 

The designers use personas during the pre-launching session to save valuable time and resources - rather than testing the product with real users. 

A great product is created based on the empathy of the target audience. Personas offer means to match with the users. 

The designers always try to delve into the heads of real users and solve their problems by designing a persona. They can be termed more appropriately as a distilled essence of real users. It measures design effectiveness through the eyes of the users. 

They create a product that surpasses their expectations. This is interpreted as understanding user empathy. Only by using a persona, it becomes possible to create a user-centric product with increased user satisfaction.

Have you thought about your user experience? Do you have it designed? You have to tell me everything.