How personas fit into the design process
Goal-directed design is an approach developed by Alan Cooper in 1995, which is based on the idea that product success depends on how well it satisfies user goals and makes them happy. At the same time, product implementation should comply with business needs and technical constraints. User personas play an essential role here since they enable teams to focus on user goals while developing products.
The design process can be split into 6 steps:
- Research: The research stage implies conducting contextual interviews, observations, as well as market research, brand strategy, competitive product audits, and interviews with stakeholders, developers, and subject matter experts.
- Modeling: At this stage, based on the data gathered during user research, we create personas — the best tool for communicating data about user behaviors, attitudes, goals, habits, environments, and challenges.
- Requirement definition: Personas help us remember user goals, understand the main tasks, and create scenarios — narrative descriptions of how a persona interacts with a product in a given context to achieve their goals. Based on this, we can formulate product requirements.
- Design framework: At this stage, designers work on the overall product concept, defining the basic frameworks for the product's behavior, visual design, and physical form, if necessary.
- Refinement definition: This stage is similar to the previous one but is more centered on details and implementation.
- Design support: At this stage, developers evaluate the operability of design solutions. Some solutions need to be adjusted and scaled down depending on the availability of time and resources.
Goal-directed design eliminates boundaries between developers, stakeholders, and designers. It proves that design isn't guesswork or a product of a designer's imagination or preferences.
