Organization: Design for America - UT
The Design Thinking process often leads to an abundance of research data. Reviewing this data can be an arduous process, and the empathetic side of the research is often lost in the endless survey responses and interview logs. User personas offer a way out - a method of simultaneously encapsulating the research process’ major outcomes and creating a relatable “user.”
What is a user persona?
Put simply, a user persona is a fictional character created by designers to represent the users they’re designing for. This character is commonly the culmination of a design team’s ethnographic research, and while user personas are usually not (and generally shouldn’t be) based on any specific person, they should reflect the traits of distinct groups within the population of interest. Depending on the product being designed and its user base, multiple user personas can be created. User personas can be comprised of many different attributes depending on the depth and breadth of the research conducted; however, a good starting point is to consider the persona’s characteristics, goals, and frustrations.
Characteristics help to contextualize the persona and make them seem real and relatable. They include details such as age, gender, occupation, hobbies, and location. Characteristics can be derived from ethnographic research, or they may be completely fictional (and somewhat irrelevant) details thrown in to make the persona seem more “human” – like their favorite color.
Goals are usually specific attributes based on research data. Goals define aspirations that the designer’s end product can help fulfill.
Frustrations are key attributes as they represent the persona’s pain points. Since designers often design a product to improve a specific experience, it is necessary to uncover when in the experience users experience negative emotions; i.e., their pain points. A popular tool called a journey map tracks a user’s emotions (including pain points) throughout this experience (also called a journey), so designers know what needs to be improved.
A quote is a statement that distills the persona’s archetype to a single short sentence. The quote can be completely made-up, or can be something mentioned by a respondent during ethnographic research. A good quote gives readers deeper insight into a persona’s personality, and it should also complement their other attributes.
A user persona that we created in the Healthy Eating project for Texas DFA. Template @dribble
Why User Personas?
Ultimately, the goal of a user persona is to create a fictional “user” that can be the focal point of a designer’s efforts as they progress through the Design Thinking process. This is why designers strive to create the most complete, accurate persona(s) they can, and why they may change the personas as new information emerges. The more accurate and detailed the persona, the more the end product will suit the needs of the target audience. By creating user personas, researchers can categorize their data (a step they were likely to take anyway) and turn it into a well-rounded package that is easily digestible by themselves and their stakeholders.
User Personas Applied: the DFA - UT Healthy Eating Project
My recent experience with using user personas was on the Healthy Eating project team of Design for America - UT. Our team conducted ethnographic research to get a better understanding of the eating habits of University of Texas students and what we could do to improve them. Personas were an integral part of our project, as they allowed us to aggregate our research to create three distinct personas: Sarah the routine eater (whose profile is shown above), Jonathan the dependent eater, and Lindsay the home chef.
Our team used data from several user interviews to create our user personas and to get a deeper understanding of our end users’ thought processes.
After conducting surveys and interviews, our team noticed patterns in people with similar eating habits. For example, we found that students who lived on campus and ate at dining halls shared some traits with those who lived off campus and ate mostly frozen food or food they got from their parents. Both these groups were reliant on an outside source for their meals, so we created the persona of Jonathan based on their shared experience. By contrast, those who fell under Sarah’s persona usually either cooked simple recipes for themselves or ate out at convenient locations.
Coming into this project, our team had a few misconceptions that needed to be cleared up. For example, we believed that a common experience shared by most students was grocery shopping, so we prematurely selected this as our target experience. This group of students also eventually served as the foundation for our first persona, Sarah. Creating user personas was instrumental to revealing the flaws in our initial assumption: as we interviewed more people, we realized many students got their food from other sources (like their parents or a non-UT dining hall). As other similarities emerged among this new group of students, our team decided to create a new persona (that of Jonathan) around them. Doing so allowed us to reframe our project, a process which resulted in a new target experience (a student’s daily food journey) and a new target audience (only students under Sarah’s persona).
User personas are a tool like any other. When used properly, they can benefit a project and reduce the amount of work a designer has to do. Here are some lessons our team learned over the course of using them:
Don’t make personas any more detailed than they have to be. Adding extraneous details distracts from their core purpose, and more details means more chances for someone to get confused.
Make sure personas are distinct. While some shared characteristics may be acceptable (or even unavoidable), if two personas become too similar, it may become necessary to redefine the traits of at least one persona.
Keep the project scope in mind. After having developed our three personas in the Healthy Eating Project, my first instinct was to attempt to create a solution for all three. However, after re-evaluating our resources, our team settled on one persona, Sarah, towards which to focus our solution. Given the distinct nature of the various personas within a project, it will often be necessary to brainstorm a separate solution for each one.
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