Art and design are subjective, and different people will respond to them in different ways based on their feelings, likings, and values. While designing a website/application, making a product, or planning a marketing campaign, it is necessary to understand the target audience. It allows to have a focused approach and accomplish desired goals. Creating your user personas is one of the first steps towards better understanding your users, how they feel while using a certain product, the environment in which they are using the product, how they respond to certain features of a product, and many more such characteristics. So how do you do that? Let’s read ahead.
What are User Personas?
User Personas represent the needs, goals, and characteristics of the larger group of Users. They help understand the user base by creating a fictitious profile based on data collected from the actual users. They represent the habits and preferences of the customers. It helps the product team set a benchmark and design products/solutions that provide a rich user experience.
Why are User Personas Important?
User Personas help target the actual users rather than generic ones. To make a product successful, it is crucial to have a deep understanding of the target audience. Product designers create solutions when they know the needs, motivations, pain points, habits, behavior patterns, goals, skills, attitudes, background information, and the environment in which a persona operates. It is essential to design a good User Experience based on the Personas.
How to make User Personas?
Data Gathering
A Persona is created to avoid generalization. Data gathering will help to gather facts and understand the user. Quantitative(Surveys, questionnaires, Sampling) or qualitative methods(Interviews, Focus Groups, Ethnography) can be used based on which is most suitable.
Analyze
After data collection, the data needs to be organized and analyzed to filter the unnecessary information. There are various ways to represent the data like affinity mapping, empathy mapping, etcetera. The pain points and goals are to be understood here.
Build Personas
The structure of User Persona is as follows:
Fictional name, picture, Bio(occupation, education, age, gender), likes, dislikes, quotes of real users, hobbies, goals, gains, and behavior.
Empathize
It is the first step of the UX Design process and the core values to design user-centric products/services. The designer should try to empathize with the user to gain perspective on how the user perceives the product. It will help create the best products for the users.
Identify
The main reason to do research is to identify the pain points, motivations, needs, and habits of the users. Identify the various scenarios that the users are in to gather different perspectives. The designer will use these data points to move ahead in the UX Design process.
Resources to create User Personas:
Here are a few resources that will simplify making User Personas in UX Design for you.
- Make my Persona by HubSpot
- Live Persona by Delve AI
- SEMrush
- Xtensio.com
- Upcloseandpersona.com
- User Forge
- Smaply
The following images will help you get familiar with User Personas, and it has all the essential elements required to design a product’s website or application. At our digital design agency, we create personas for all projects we take on.
I hope the above information helps you in your journey towards UX Design. You can learn more about UX Design at the Procreator Blog.
