Persona
The Non-Elastic User
What is persona? Well, before I explain more about this, we will take a look at terminology ‘user centered design’. While it is widely considered that almost every industrial product should be designed to meet customer needs, in the field of information technology we call this customer needs as user needs. In most cases in IT field, not all users are necessarily customers too. Thus, the term user centered in IT is most likely the same with ‘customer oriented’ in other field of industry.
However, the term ‘user’ has been abused too many times in practice of IT product and service development. Often the development team, the marketing department, the project sponsor, and the chief executive officer all talk about imaginary ‘user’ that is formed in their own mind. And often that the user they talk about in their meetings and arguments is no more than how they think the user should be. A developer should notice that in scenario diagram we often see sentences like this, “user fill the form and then press the submit button” without knowing who is this user? How old is he or she? What is his/her goal to achieve using the software?
Here is a little example taken from ‘The User is Always Right’ , a book by Steve Mulder and Ziv Yaar:
“Recently, a friend of mine, Francis, started looking to buy a house, and the process reminded me once again of the importance of understanding our users.
Francis is a 33-year-old nurse living in Atlanta with her husband Michael, and for years, they have talked about buying a home. One of her favorite things to do on Sundays is to browse the real estate section of the newspaper and then convince Michael to walk through one or two open houses in the area just for fun. She loves imagining where they’d put their furniture and which house their cat Gatsby would like the best. After Michael promotion, now Francis might be able to really afford a house. Francis now more focus in how to find his first house. Finally she powers up her iMac and starts looking through several real estate web sites with the following goals in mind:
- Learn about the home-buying process, including understanding all the jargon, realtor involvement, mortgages, and house evaluation criteria.
- Find out what they can afford based on their savings, salaries, current rates, and any special program she can find.
- Discover what areas of Atlanta are desirable, taking into account schools, transportation, parks, crime, and overall reputation.
- Find houses that match their criteria.”
Well, a described Francis above is not a real person. She is persona used by the authors to design user experience for their real estate web site development.
From the example above, we can learn that persona is representation of a real user. A set of personas is hypothetical archetypes of actual users. Personas are defined by their goals and complemented with needed details related to the software that is developed: their ages, their educational background, their preferences, and other relevant information specified to the domain of the developed software. But then again, how are personas created? How to make sure that personas represent archetypes of actual users? Here in Starqle Indonesia, it is our main concern to develop competency regarding this kind of topic. Well, we will share about this in upcoming articles. What we need to share with you for now is that what persona is and how using them will benefit you.
From the same book, Mulder wrote that personas can benefit in several ways:
- Personas bring focus You can not create an IT product or service for everyone. Using personas, we know who the users are and who we should serve.
- Personas build empathy Another popular jargon is that you are not your users. Persona helps you live in your user’s shoes and understand how the persona will react to certain design.
- Personas encourage consensus Personas bring the team together in one shared vision and understanding of exactly whom you are designing to and what they want.
- Personas create efficiency When you know who will use your designed software, you will be able to design them more efficiently. And creating persona will just do that: making sure who will use the software.
- Personas lead to better decisions Ultimately, personas will help everyone to make better decisions. Grounded in research, personas can make every stakeholder of your IT product or service feel more confident about decision they take regarding users.