You Are Not Your Audience: The Need for User-Persona

7 min readOct 7, 2021

User persona is a tool to empathize in a UX design process

“People ignore design that ignores people.”
— Frank Chimero, Designer

User-Centered Design

This must have heard the term UI and UX. The concept of creating a product that is pleasing to see and interact with based on what users need. This guy, user-centered design, is a friend. User-Centered Design (UCD) was first introduced 30 years ago by Donald Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things. UCD is used to describe design based on the needs of the user. A product is created to help consumers solve a problem. Hence, it should be designed thoughtfully to meet the expectation.

One of the analysis tools in UCD is user persona. Do you see any difference between “I think we should do this….” and “Our user A, would think this….”. The first one is personal preference, whereas the second is persona. See why the second one is better?

According to Alan Cooper, “Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. […] Personas are defined by their goals.”

Personas are fictional characters representing a unique group of people who share common goals. To create them, you cannot only assume stuff and put them into a piece of drawing. They must be memorable, actionable, and distinct from one another. A good persona eases designers to recall and empathize target audience quickly. In the later section, I will explain to you what are the steps to create a good persona.

Primary Goals

Persona can create empathy and motivation for the product team. It allows us to connect emotionally with specific users rather than abstract collections of users as they can be a composite sketch of 10 people all rolled into 1. Aside from that, persona is a communication tool that can help to summarize what we know about our users. Hence, it will be easier to highlight the pain points and opportunities to tailor our products.

Avoid Assumption

You are not your audience. A good designer doesn’t involve many assumptions in their design as they rely more on data. Norman states two perspectives:

1. “Most of the everyday products we use daily were not designed based on the user’s understanding, but the knowledge of the activity they were intended to.”

2. “History is filled with products that made users adapt to them and not the other way around. our field’s reality is that most product owners don’t want to invest in user involvement, so we had to find ways around it.”

3 Types of Persona

Proto personas: This is something that we do in almost every project. They are based on the product owner’s existing knowledge or assumptions about the users. Although this isn’t perfect, this works in many cases. Proto persona requires less effort and budget.
Qualitative personas: This second type is based on simple qualitative research, such as interviews, usability tests, or field studies.
Statistical personas: The mix of quantitative and qualitative research. This is the most labor-intensive type of persona. It requires some exploratory qualitative research beforehand, then creating another survey based on that data. The result is then analyzed by using a statistical approach to identify clusters of users.

How We Create a Persona

According to Arthur McCay from UXpressia, there are 8 steps to create a good persona:

Do research: Interview 5–30 people per role, interview people who directly communicate with them, web surveys, or others.
Segment your audience: Identify common behavioral attributes.
Decide on the layout: It doesn’t have to be fancy visuals. Options are provided below.
Set demographic info
Describe Persona’s background
Define Persona’s goals
Define motivations and frustrations: 🙍
Add other ingredients: Add relevant information like quotes, tech used, etc.

Who handles most of these tasks? UX researcher.

Functional Templates

You might be more familiar with colorful persona templates. The core is the message it conveys for the designer. I personally prefer google docs or google Sheets’ style formats as it saves time to think of the visuals. Below, I attached some examples I found on the Internet.

Buyer Persona

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aUezdcge79nDHKsAymYTomf61KEJgD767Q0F2D7Zn94/edit

Marketing Persona

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FZkbHOlG6tozECCmjp7HHLWkC5XwkY9P0AgO3sfkgW8/edit#gid=58649069

Let’s Create a Persona from User Stories

Let’s go practical. You are asked to create a persona from those user stories to redesign the Amazon site. Go to this link to extract stories: Link

I will give you one example with story #2: Bilvakker.

“My mother who´s 67 years old is considering buying shampoo online after seeing a special offer on Facebook. She goes to Amazon and starts browsing. She looks for a brand she knows and clicks through the shampoo overview. She looks at the images and decides to buy one. She calls customer service to make sure she has done everything correctly. Unfortunately, customer service is closed.”

How We Implemented in Our Project

Our platform — Walkiddie —has 4 categories of users:

1. Investor

Investors are Walkiddie’s main users. They will be collectively investing in arcade games bought by the merchant. Our persona aims to portray the user’s background, needs, and frustrations.

Firstly, we defined the background. We called this fake user Pak Jonathan, who is literate about investment and regularly invests his money. But he wants to invest in other forms of capital.
His need, as an investor is to get positive returns and track his investments transparently. His frustration is regarding the credibility of a platform and financial reports/information that is not transparent.
We made up this profile, but we picked a general scenario that we expect to be relevant with our future users.

2. Merchant

Merchants (Mitra in Bahasa) are the second customer segment of the app. They will be purchasing the arcade game from the app which will be collectively funded by investors.

We called this fake user Ibu Jane, who is an owner of a medium-sized toy store.
She wants to increase the store profits from another service such as arcade games that can be played by visitors by purchasing coins prior.
However, the expense to buy such items is costly. She doesn’t know where to maintain the arcade game and how much will cost.

3. Technician

Technicians (or Operators) are supporting role in the app. They will be repairing broken games that are located in merchant stores.

We called this fake user Pak Joko, who is an arcade game technician of Walkiddie. Prior to his current role, he worked as a toys machine technician in many shopping malls’ game centers.
He needs to know the complete address of the game stores, the detailed description of the broken arcades, and for efficiency, the proximity between one store to another. It’s nice if he can get a categorization of stores near his area so he can plan his visits efficiently.
His frustration is bad communication with merchants, and scattered destination locations that consumed his time on the road.

4. Admin

This is the last supporting role of the app. His/her tasks are including :

approve/reject every new investment
approve/reject every new procurement
approve/reject every new store
approve/reject new toys offered by Walkiddie

Their needs are a simple interface, and complete and clear information is provided for every new investment/procurement/store/toy. It can become really frustrating many new requests come at the same time, meanwhile, they have to check each one of them manually.

Conclusion

Although those profiles are not real, they are close enough to represent the future users of the app based on the client’s descriptions. They are pretty generics. After all, describing personas such that can help us to visualize the app better and create more suitable features for our users.

In the lake of innovations, millions of great products compete to raise on market. Therefore, creating a good product that is based on what many people needs will be the key to the success of the product. In order to do so, research must be done well and cannot be neglected. Thus, Persona helps you to empathize and question the needs of your product.