Personas are more useful than you think

By using a persona to answer these questions, product design teams can actually be in the user's shoes, and can better meet a real user's needs and wants. Personas are not what people tell you about themselves; they are observations and descriptions of why (motivation) a person does what he/she does.

Personas are useful in considering the goals, desires, and limitations of brand buyers and users in order to help to guide decisions about a service, product or interaction space such as features, interactions, and visual design of a website. Personas may also be used as part of a user-centered design process for designing software and are also considered a part of interaction design (IxD), having been used in industrial design and more recently for online marketing purposes.
 
A user persona is a representation of the goals and behavior of a hypothesized group of users. In most cases, personas are synthesized from data collected from interviews with users. They are captured in 1–2 page descriptions that include behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, and environment, with a few fictional personal details to make the persona a realistic character. For each product, more than one persona is usually created, but one persona should always be the primary focus for the design. See more

Persona’s are widely used in UX studies for the last decade at least, of UX research includes this method in its projects. 

Here are a few ideas I have selected about a persona and how they make sense to use. Here are five ideas to help you consider personas differently.

1.      Real or Real Enough-It’s easy to interchange the words “user” and “persona” for someone that does not know how personas are developed and how users are defined in a given project. I believe understanding the difference the two can lead to a wealth of information and understanding of your client and their customers. Personas are (usually) well structured factious profiles of an ideal customer (good/bad). They function as representations that help guide strategic decisions and the design of an application how someone will use it.

2.      Love me, Love me not- Personas are not all about your customers likes and dislikes in regards to things that don’t fall within the parameters of project. Things like employees of the company, location of the headquarters and so on are just not relevant at all. Personas search out and find motivations, expectations, and so on. A good persona is a story that gives us a glimpse into the skills, perspective, background and goals of your (the clients) ideal client in pre-determined situation. In short, personas bring a user to life. 

 

3.      You’re doing too much- Personas save ux teams plenty of time and money, if done correctly it is a valuable time saving tool. The downfall to this method is spending too much time creating them. Do not allow yourself or your team to spend too much time creating a persona. All you want to concentrate on in this process is skills, attitudes, motivations, environment and goals. 

4.      What makes the clock tick-  Listening to your customer is useful and great for business but knowing what your customer thinks is kinda misleading in the case of personas when used in focus groups. You really want to avoid asking for opinions and focus your time on uncovering motivations. Personas allow you to understand, identify and communicate what the user needs efficiently and effectively. Personas, along with usability testing, identify specific opportunities to improve, innovate on, and bridge the gaps to make sure you are delivering a fully functional and usable product with the most value to the user.

5.      You’re user wants benefit not just another answer Personas give a name, face and story to the user that your designing for, they give a voice to this person. If you don’t know who your designing for you can’t actually design your project efficiently enough to expect success. Personas give your target a seat at the table. 

Persona's are able to provide details to important questions that a "user" cannot define.

• Which information is necessary at which point of the day?
• Is the user concentrating on only one thing at a time?
• Does the user have frequent interruptions during their experience?
• Why is he/she using the product?
• What motivates him/her to use this specific product over a competitor's?