My First User Personas!
Purpose of this article is to pen down my understandings on What, Why and How of User Personas while I finish my first case study.
What ?
A user persona is a representation of an end user. This is also an end product of all your user research. Anyone glancing at the personas should understand which user base is targeted. It depicts the users needs, experiences, behaviors and goals.
Why?
- To give a shape to the findings from user research. Building an end product out of the research, user personas is a way to do that.
- They can be revisited whenever there is a confusion about the user at a later stage of product development.
- It can also give a brief idea about the users to stakeholders and engineers who weren’t a part of user research and can help them empathize.
How?
There are various ways a user persona can be defined. A lot of templates are available on the web. I created user personas using a table as the template which kept the information precise and organized.
Basic Info — This includes basic demography of the user. For example, their name, age, picture, summary statement etc.
Goals/Needs — This includes listing of users goals which they want to accomplish in respect to the kind of problem you’re trying to solve.
Behavior — A short description on users’ core behavioral traits. Identifying how the user would behave given a particular situation.
Experiences/Pain Points — Listing out relevant experiences from the past can help identify users’ current pain points.
Personas from my case study
My first case study was on the day to day problems a frequent user of the UPI payment method could face indulging in small transactions. These user personas were a part of it.
