Personas in UX Research

Explore the use of personas in UX research, a powerful technique for creating representative user archetypes
Personas in UX Research Lesson

Most businesses know that the key to success today is designing user-centered products and services rather than technology-centered ones. Personas are a great tool for creating solutions based on user goals, behaviors, motivations, and needs.

One of the most significant advantages of using personas is that they build empathy and make users memorable among team members. Personas become imaginary team members that help drive design solutions with users' needs at heart.

Despite all the advantages of introducing personas in your design process, you can only effectively use personas in teams where stakeholders understand the persona's importance and user-centered design. Otherwise, it's too expensive and time-consuming.[1]

What is a persona?

According to the NN Group, a persona is a fictional yet realistic description of a typical or target user of the product. A persona doesn't represent a living human being but should be described as a real individual.[2]

A persona synthesizes observations of the target audience gained from real-life interviews, field studies, focus groups, card sorting, and other user research methods. It includes details about user needs, beliefs, pain points, and goals and may also contain background information such as age, gender, behaviors, and occupation if necessary.

Personas enable designers to focus on manageable archetypes and create more personalized products rather than build a generic product that attempts to please everyone.

The purpose of personas

Generally, a user persona is a document the team can use as a reference point throughout the design process. Plus, imaginary characters are easier to remember than vague concepts and data points about user behavior. A persona becomes a living and breathing character that team members refer to by name during discussions.

Here are the main benefits of using a persona tool:

  • It helps designers remember who their users are. Personas remind designers that designing for everyone is designing for no one. Personas enable prioritizing and help decide which user group is more important and what features will benefit them.
  • Develop empathy. With personas, designers can walk in users' shoes and understand users' needs and pain points better.
  • Make better design decisions. Whenever designers have doubts, they can refer to personas to prove their assumptions right or wrong and make a decision based on real data.
  • Find a consensus. A persona document works as a benchmark in discussions with clients or stakeholders who weren't involved in user research. This tool helps the whole team stay on the same page and share the same understanding of users.

Pro Tip! Personas can work as templates for recruiting user research participants.

UX personas vs marketing personas Bad Practice
UX personas vs marketing personas Best Practice

User or UX personas represent your end users' needs and help designers develop empathy for users. In contrastmarketing or buyer personas represent your target customers and their needs. Using buyer personas, your marketing team can plan offers and content that meet your customers' preferences.[3]

Isn't an end-user also a buyer? Users can be buyers, but not always. For example, you decide to gift your friend a yoga app subscription. You're a buyer, but your friend is the one who is going to use this app. It means a buyer persona's needs will likely differ from a user persona's needs.

Moreover, a buyer persona can include decision-makers with different goals and expectations. For example, a buyer persona can be represented by supervisors, managers, and team leads who are in charge of deciding whether to buy a software license for a design team or not.

Your team should consider both buyers' and users' needs when designing products/services and creating marketing content.[4]

When to create personas

Ideally, you should create personas as early as possible in the process. Personas should be based on research data, not on your assumptions or expectations of an ideal user. Thus, you might include persona creation in the research phase for a product or feature before the design stage starts.

You can use data derived from user interviews, field studies, surveys, card sorting, or other user research methods to create a persona that accurately represents your actual end-users.

As your product evolves, your persona(s) should be updated. The persona creation process might start early, but the document can be adjusted or eliminated later as you gain more data about users.

Personas should be iterative

The persona creation process is iterative. As new data is collected, personas should be revised and improved. You may find out that the two personas share the same characteristics and can be combined into one. Or a persona may contain enough distinctive features to be split into two personas.

When is it time to update your personas? According to the NN Group, it should happen when there are:

  • Changes in your business and technology. If your product or your competitors' products have evolved significantly, it's likely that users' goals and tasks have changed too.
  • Changes in user demographics and interaction patterns. Pay attention to whether your user segments have expanded and the demographics have changed correspondingly. Stay up-to-date with your website analytics and user testing data. Changes in users' behaviors, expectations, and needs are another reason for updating your existing persona description.

How often should you update your personas? According to a NN Group survey among 156 user-experience professionals, persona updates should occur every 1–4 years. Those who prefer to make small tweaks here and there, like 28% of respondents, may revise personas quarterly or more frequently.[5]

What to include in a persona Bad Practice
What to include in a persona Best Practice

Persona creation is a collaborative process and should be done with team members. It’s a good opportunity to prove to your team that personas are based on raw data gathered during user research and not some made-up, unrealistic characters.

Start with defining a persona's characteristics by analyzing the research data, grouping similar traits, and eliminating those that seem irrelevant to the business.

The most common attributes of a persona include:

  • Image and name: These details make a persona more believable and realistic. Putting a face to the name helps your teammates empathize with users and imagine them in various scenarios throughout the product.
  • Demographics: A persona may include details like location, age, gender, as well as family status, job, education, background, and technical skills relevant to your product.
  • Psychographics: Goals, pain points, behaviors, and opinions help understand what users do on a daily basis and what their motivations and experiences are with your or competitors' products.
  • Quote: Although it's made up of users' words and thoughts, a quote sums up the persona's attitude and their most important goal.[6]

Pro Tip! Avoid using images of celebrities or unrealistic images. A photograph should reflect your persona's age, gender, ethnicity, and personality.

What not to include in a persona Bad Practice
What not to include in a persona Best Practice

When building a persona, you might be confused about what details are essential and what can be omitted to prevent overwhelming team members. The more excessive data the persona contains, the less memorable it becomes.

The main rule is to include only relevant data that can help make design decisions and influence the final product. For example, information about a persona's favorite travel destinations has no value for a taxi app. What really matters here is if the persona values comfort and safety and has a busy schedule on average. In this case, it should be the team's goal to create an app with an intuitive interface that allows users to rate cars and order a taxi in a hurry or on the go.

How personas fit into the design process Bad Practice
How personas fit into the design process Best Practice

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.

Base personas on data

A good persona should be based on user research. Research methods help define behavior patterns that suggest goals and motivations, which eventually help formulate product requirements. Research-based personas are more credible to stakeholders and can be used to support design decisions.

If your business lacks the time or the budget to conduct proper research, you can always start with a persona that is based on assumptions. Use competitor analysis, social media conversations, or stakeholder interviews to determine what type of users your product will appeal to. This persona can only be used to test your ideas and should never become a reference point for developing final design solutions. Otherwise, it can lead to creating a product or service that no one actually needs.[7]

Identify patterns to create your personas

The persona-creation process starts when you've completed your research and have collected data describing user behavior. To begin with, analyze data to identify users' characteristics or behavioral patterns they've demonstrated during user-research activities and group similar ones into clusters.

Gradually, you'll notice that some attributes are similar and can be merged together. Other attributes may appear too irrelevant to your product or service and can be eliminated. These similarities and differences can be based on:

  • How users complete certain tasks
  • How they find out about a product/service
  • How they solve problems
  • Their end goals and environments in which they usually interact with a product
  • Motivations and pain points
  • Demographics

Be specific when looking for patterns. For example, if your product helps project managers manage teams, you should pay attention to things like their typical weekday, tools they use when working, how many hours they usually work, and their team size.

During the next step, identify a few types of users and compare them to each other to ensure they do not share similar characteristics.

Once distinct roles emerge, enhance the characters with details like name, photo, gender, age, etc., to make them more realistic, believable, and memorable.

Limit the number of personas you use Bad Practice
Limit the number of personas you use Best Practice

You can't apply the "the more, the better" rule when it comes to persona creation. The number of personas depends on your research data and market segmentation. If your product or service is available internationally and you have many user groups, it still doesn’t mean you should have dozens of personas.

Some user groups with similar characteristics can be merged. Other groups representing small or specific segments are not worth designing for and can be eliminated. Plus, personas are pretty hard to maintain and update regularly, so you would end up wasting too much time and effort keeping them all updated. The more personas you have, the harder it is to create a more focused product.[8]

When you have more than one persona, it makes sense to differentiate between primary and secondary personas:

  • A primary persona represents the most relevant and the largest group of users who actually use your product.
  • A secondary persona(s) refers to potential users or users who have special needs (like people with disabilities).[9]

Pro Tip! There's no ideal number for personas, as it depends on your product's needs, but 1 or 2 is a safe bet.

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