What is Persona? Is that Important?
When you are going to make a website design, have you ever think about the users? If so, have you ever think further about the background of user? Who is the user? What is the user range of age? So many questions that will make you dizzy.
In order to create a website design is not a simple job to do. Well, you can not just went straight to make a design based on your own imagination. The design that was made going to be used by other people and guess what, each people have different personality and different taste. What do you think good does not mean it is good for the others or satisfy what they want.
Then, what should I do? I want my design liked my most people!
Make sure you already have a Persona before start making a design
If you wonder what persona is here is the answer. Persona are made-up character based on data you have about the customer. Persona will help you to understand what your client wanted better. Simply, a single persona is made by having group of person with similar personality.
Then, how to make a Persona?
Simple, the very first step is to gather data from targeted user(s). If you want gather data from targeted user(s), you can do an Interview. During the Interview process, you can ask what is like what they wanted, what they do with the upcoming design, what they dislike.
After you gathering all data you need, then you can start to analyze all of them. By analyzing the data you got from the interview, you can get some pattern(s). Those pattern can be grouped into a single group based on their interview result.
Then, after you done grouping the user(s) after the data analyze you can start creating the persona. A good persona should at least contain this following content :
- Name
- Photo
- Personal quote
- Background
- Age, Gender, Job, Location
- User Characteristics
- Goals, thing they wanted to achieve by using the product(s)
- Frustrations, thing that give them hard time to understand or to use product(s).
Right after you created the persona(s), you can start to make the product design based on the persona(s) you have.
After we made the Persona, what to do next?
Here I got some example to show how to make a design based on Persona. This Persona is based on data we have from our client in Software Design course project. Our client wish to have a mobile based web design to sell aquaculture based product for distributor. Basically, there is two kind of users, admin and distributor.
The first persona we made is an admin persona. Based on the persona, we can extract few information about the admin(s) user. From the persona, we know that Carvin had hard time to use complex UI, which mean we have to implement a design that was easy to use. He also have a problem when a product can not have multiple pricing, due to it is possible to get a discount when a distributor buy a lot of item(s). So we have to make a design that was dynamic for admin to add a new pricing for an item(s).
We still have another Persona remaining, the Distributor persona.
Based from the distributor persona, we can get a the information about what Samantha wanted. Goal wise, we know that a distributor(s) wanted to check their transaction history and their transaction progress. Knowing this, we have to make sure that the product we made have an ability to check the transaction history and progress. Based on frustations, the distributor also wanted to know about wholesaler price for an item, since we already made it possible for admin to add new pricing, the distributor(s) should be able to see them as well.
And there is the last persona example I had, but this one is not for Software Design Project
This persona is all about customer(s). By the information provided by this Persona, we can see Natalie goals and frustrations. Like of many goals Natalie prefer were to be able to do Split Bill and Collecting debt from her friend(s). Her frustration also feels that doing Split Bill manually is hard. Therefore, we built a solutions in our product to have a Split Bill feature.
In My Opinion
Having a persona will help you satisfy the user(s) need easier, as you do not need to check on every single data you have. Instead, you can group them and make a persona that represent the user(s). Basically with persona(s), we can make a design that easily satisfy most of user(s) need easier.
But what makes Persona so important anyway? Well, for me the two most important things in Persona is Goals and Frustrations. When Goals tend to tell what the customer(s) wanted to achieve by using the product, Frustrations is the reverse one. Frustrations will tell about what is painful for Customer, it can be based either on the product or real life issue. For example, user(s) hangout a lot with his/her friends, and they like to eat together, but Splitting the Bill for what each personal order is not easy due to Tax and Service Charge. Even that both component were important in Persona, I think that Frustrations is the most important one. Why? because, we built product to help customer(s) dealing with their problem else there is no point for customer(s) to use our product.
End of the ropes. So is persona really important? For me, it is very important. By having the persona(s), we can make a design based on that. Implementing everything the user(s) want is impossible, so we just need to pick what mostly wanted right?
I hope that this article is useful for you guys. Have a good day!
