- Published on
Personas: Character Sheets for Designers
- Authors
- Name
- Asfiolitha Wilmarani
- Trakteer
This is essentially my debut post in this site and I'm writing this some time around midnight, so bear with me đ. Today I'm going to talk about Personas and how it can help us understand our user's perspective and needs.
Persona: What It is and What It is Not
A persona is a generalization or archetype whose goals and needs represent those of a typical user group of our product. Gosh, that was wordy. Let me rephrase. It essentially means that you're trying to make a fictional user whose behavior pattern, goals, attitude, and other characteristics represent a larger group of users.
Note that a persona is fictional, but you try to describe it as realistic as possible as if it's an actual living humanâwhich it is not. It is presented in a document (usually not more than 2 pages), and consists of thorough descriptions of the persona's concerns, goals, and needs.
You would want to add some fictional spices to enrich the persona's background information, such as age, gender, behavior, skills, occupation, even details like hobbies and quirks. These spices aid in giving the persona some individuality, as although it is not an actual person, it should be described as if they were real people (who would have those detailed traits).
Though, another thing to be noted is that personas != user groups. When designing user segments or user groups, the team usually summarizes a good amount of data to get the attributes of a single group. As this method is impersonal, it's hard to keep these attributes in mind when designing. Meanwhile, personas are supposed to be personal. Going back to that fictional spices I'd mentioned before, personas can create narratives that are memorable and easier to relate to. As a result, it's easier to keep it in mind throughout the design phase to aid in making decisions.
Why is It Important?
In short, it makes designer's life easier. But not really. Let me explain.
There are two main benefit to making a persona (based on my reading and summarizing): it builds empathy and aids in making design decision.
Builds empathy
I think we've all heard of the phrase Design Thinking at least one time in our lives (if not, you just did). The very first phase of the Design Thinking process is empathy, and creating personas can help a great deal with that. Why? Because as stated above, the process of creating a persona involves some degree of understanding of your target users. To understand their needs, goals, and pain points, you first need no empathize.
This step is crucial, as it helps designers realize that different people have different goals and pain points. By empathizing to the needs of a persona, designers may better empathize to what a real person might need.
Aids in Making Design Decision
Personas help designers know who they're designing for. It helps designers realize that there are real people with different personality, needs, and goals that are going to use the product. Keeping this in mind, the designers will then try to consider them and design the best product for them.
Having personas also help designers avoid designing to please everyone (as it is not possible). By focusing the target to personas created beforehand, designers can better focus and make design decisions based on their needs and goals.
How We Created Personas for Ajaib on DEX
Before diving into this project head first, I knew next to nothing about trading cryptocurrencies. Yet, my team and I needed to build an integrated app to help ease the pain points of existing crypto-traders. You better believe the first step I did was to have a mental breakdown. The next thing I did, was to explore and empathize.
Our client kindly described his concerns, and we took notes. Fortunately for us, one of our team members in El Pepe is quite experienced in crypto-trading as a user. This makes the process a little easier. Just a little, because there's still a ton to learn.
We created three personas, one for noobs beginners to crypto-trading, one for avid crypto-traders, and one for a generalized investor who also happen to do crypto-trading. Meet Rahmat, Kevin, and Oke.
Rahmat is the one I can relate to the most, as he is a newbie that's eager to learn more about investing in cryptocurrencies. The thing pushing him forward is his interest in learning about this subject. He feels like he needs to gather courage to be able to start. For that, he's going to need a lot of information before he can jump into the learning-by-doing and trial-and-error step of his journey.
Kevin is a mature and seasoned investor who's been doing this for a long time. He's got the know-hows and he know what he's doing, but he wants to dig deeper. He wants news and information to update with the current trends, and he wants to easily keep up with it.
Oke is the avid crypto-trader with a background in IT. He wants this to be effortless as he doesn't have a lot of time in his plate. He needs something that he can use in between his lunch hours and commute, something fast and mobile.
Based on these three personas, we continued our design phase into creating wireframes and mockups that cater to their needs. This next phase will be discussed in a future post, so stay tuned for it~
TL;DR
- Personas are fictional beings, like character sheets for designers.
- It is not an individual, living human being, but is described to be as realistic as possible.
- Personas aid designers in empathizing and making design decisions.
That is all I have for now. See you on the next one~