Facilitating Storytelling: UX Personas
Creating data-driven personas is one of my favorite activities when it comes to UX and design.
No matter what way or solving users’ problems you prefer, you always need something to help you better:
- Visualize a person you create a solution for;
- Be able to sympathize with their issues and get into their day-to-day grind;
- Explore user thoughts and ideas, as well as channels they prefer for communicating with others;
- How they consume the information;
- How your product would fit into people’s lives;
- And how they feel when they interact with it.
At the first glance, it seems like a lot to grasp, but if you turn this process into a fun activity instead of a daunting task with putting data together, everyone can benefit.
The user, because you are engaged and more interested in the process. Which means that you will more likely be interested in facilitating the problem-solving activities.
You, because you do the job, and you like it.
The company you work for, because of your input and insights on a product.
Win-win-win.
Personas are useless
I get it. There are several controversial opinions on personas and what they are user for. You can even hesitate whether you have to spend the time on creating a fictional character at all.
I want to point out here, that personas are not mandatory. It’s not the main piece of the puzzle. If we have to compare it with puzzles, though, personas are the pieces with the blue sky, which is obviously not necessary to put together, but they obviously help you to see the whole picture.
If you have time and budget for creating personas — it will facilitate your UX process, not matter whether you work with design or marketing.
In case you need to advocate your researched and planned ideas or present something to stakeholders, personas are a great help to your storytelling process.
Necessary to mention: personas should be data-driven. Fictional characters are fun and very interesting, but not in this case. If you have a passion for creating fictional characters and fleshing them out, do consider a writing career or creative writing as a side hustle.
Fictional personas are useless. Data-driven personas — not.
Pen-on-Paper Persona
UX Pro Tip: you don’t have to use sticky notes to create a persona.
For sketching out a simple persona with some data you need just 2 things: a pen and paper.
No need to browse stock photos and spend days on creating the look of your persona. This is actually why I don’t like personas and using stock photos — or even online generators.
We know that people pay too much attention to looks. It should not be the reason for creating a persona — to show how it looks.
The reason for creating a persona should be to put all the information together and create a compelling profile of a potential user and (potential) customer of your product. It doesn’t matter how they look. It’s just nice to have a brief idea of the appears, but it’s the last thing you have to think about. Seriously.
Here’s a brief example of a UX persona you can create with the data available at your service by just filling in some forms.
I created this persona based on the information I had about my potential adversary in UX for a UX workshop I attended recently.
No need to print it as well. The persona can be purely drawn on paper without any technology at all.
Digital Persona
But you can say that it’s the 21st century, and we now use technology everywhere.
And you cannot just use a paper to help you facilitate your storytelling process. You will have nothing to show to others.
Thankfully, there are several tools for creating a persona available on the market.
Here are a few examples of UX personas that I did for one of my projects. The company was deciding on a new health platform and was considering it as a social network in the future. Based on the research and the proposed concept of the platform, we had three types of potential users and customers.
Here we used stock photos, but it was the last thing we paid attention to.
The most important aspect of creating your persona is to collect as much data as possible. The persona creation process starts not with the moment you open the persona form and write their name. Or not even at the moment you browse stock photos of people you would consider the best fit for your persona.
It starts with data.
This is what UX or Marketing persona should start with.
Creating a persona is not a creative process (even though I’m saying “creating persona”, I know).
Creating a persona is a way to visualize data for your future profits, sales, benefits, features, perks, even UI elements, and the app/website appearance.
The persona’s look is the last thing you need to pay attention to.
Data-Driven Persona
In this case, it doesn’t really matter what tool you will use for creating a persona.
Rather, what data you collect and whether this data is true.
Once you star, you might find yourself assuming and adding information to a persona that you think might be relevant, and you want this persona to have.
Just stop yourself here. If you don’t have enough data, don’t make things up.
Either don’t mention it or create a survey, dive deeper in research and find the answers if you don’t have them. Obviously, no need to Google the most popular female name in the region where you are going to launch or advertise the app or service (unless it’s a key point!), but such things as occupation, income, information channels, trends, habits, etc. should not be just assumed by you.
In case you start assuming two things can happen.
- The product is built and based on false assumptions and obviously fails in some aspects because the assumptions were not true.
- People start being biased towards personas and creating them, saying that it’s a useless UX design element, such as sticky notes, for examples.
Both of these things harm UX, you, and your performance in the company.
Lose-lose-lose.
Summing Up
- Creating UX persona and putting data together helps you, as a UXer, to have a better understanding of the industry, product, trends, and people you are advertising and providing the service or product.
- It’s a great helper when you need to present an idea for UI, marketing strategy, defend a new feature, or just explain why something is important in a way of telling a story about relevant people. The story is not fictional. The story is based on the data, and this story will always sound convincing for others.
- To create a persona — means turn the heavy amount of data and research in some visual representation that others — not researchers and graph-readers — can understand.
- You can create a persona on paper, computer, use applications or anything you like. The most important part of it is that this persona should be a compelling representation of the real data.
Important: none of the sticky notes was used for creating personas or writing this article.
Bonus: I have a prototype of a persona web app in case you are curious.
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Have an opinion? Think I have to use more sticky notes? Not sure if I’m right or just want to say something because you can? Feel free to ping me in Twitter at @oksanaivanovapm, and I’ll be glad to chat. And not only about UX.
