Persona and Goals
Design Phase: Definition
Using data collected in the analysis phase,
- Identify and name key persona: A fictitious user representing a class of users
- Identify and name key goals:
- What do users want to accomplish?
- How do different goals relate to each other?
- Goals are not Tasks! (i.e. not related to technology)
Elastic user
Elastic user can mean anyone and thus no one.
Vauge audience leads to unfocussed design.
Trying to design for everyone often means designing for no one!
To avoid this:
- Clearly define user personas before designing
- Focus on specific user needs & behaviors
- Ensure design decisions are driven by real user insights
Feature Overload: The Pitfall of Elastic Users
Feature Overload: The interface tries to serve everyone but helps no one.
- Too many functionalities can cause cognitive load
- Complex interfaces increase navigational overhead
- Design becomes unintuitive and overwhelming
- Users struggle to find what they need
Personas: Who are we designing for?
Persona is a descriptive models of users (not just single user!) that represents specific types of individuals with specific needs. Personas help us define real users, not assumptions!
- Persona is a composite archetypes based upon observed behavior patterns
- Persona represents broad cross-section of users
Why Identify and Name Key "Personas"?
- Helps alignment (consensus and commitment)
- Drives design to desired product
- Acts as a communication tool with stakeholders/developers/designers
- Helps later in usability studies to target the right users
- Helps marketing & sales plans
Why use personas in design?
Personas provide a structured way to understand users and design effectively.
A clear set of personas has a well articulated set of goals.
Personas help us:
- Identify behaviour patterns in different user groups
- Understand user motivations beyond surface-level needs
- Gain insight into how users think & make decisions
- Align design with what users want to achieve (goals)
- Uncover the reasons behind user actions
Within the design team, personas help:
- Provide a shared understanding of the target user
- Encourage empathy-driven design decisions
- Define who the product is for and who it isn't for
- Determine what the product should and shouldn't do
- Provide a stable reference point throughout the design process
- Sserve as a stand-in for real users
- Test design via walkthroughs
What makes persona?
- Persona is derived from user research and data.
- Persona represent archetypes as individuals, not real people
- Persona act as composite models of multiple users - it covers a range of archetypes and behaviours
How to Identify personas?
- Conduct user interview and observations to understand real users and their behaviors
- Identify major patterns and clusters from stakeholders & user interviews
- Synthesize their goals from collected data
- Validate personas for completeness and representativeness
- Try them out by developing narratives
How personas influence design?
- Tap into universal patterns that users recognize instinctively (unconsciously)
- Guide branding & product identity through emotional association
- Help users quickly understand the product's personality & values
- Strengthen user engagement by aligning with familiar narratives
Steps for Constructing Personas
- Identify behavioral variables
- Consider activity, attitude, aptitude, motivation, and skills
- Map interview subjects to behavioral variables
- Use character mapping techniques (e.g., from The Designer's Stance)
- Identify significant behavior patterns
- Recognize key roles and recurring user behaviors
- Synthesize characteristics and relevant goals
- Craft goal-oriented interview questions to capture user intent
- Validate & Expand Persona Attributes
- Check for completeness and redundancy
- Expand description of attributes and behaviors
- Designate persona types
- primary > secondary > supplemental > customer > served > negative
Character Map
Create a table with personas as columns and characteristics as rows.
Characteristics can be:
- Demographics: Location, Age, ...
- Relationships: Parents, children, ...
- Life Context: Familiy situation, ...
- Lifestyles & Hobbies: Hobby, Job, Car, Income, ...
- Personality & Behavior: Personality, ...
- Miscellaneous Factors
What makes a strong persona?
- specific narrative
- specific usage pattern
- embodied in a specific fictional user
- by means of text and images
- based on data
- includes specific name, photo, goals that matches persona
- various information (e.g. key characteristics, motivations, context, activities, narrative story, representative quotes, pain points)
Persona Categories
Primary persona
Primary persona is a primary target for the design of an interface.
Can be only one primary persona per interface for a product.
A primary persona will not be satisfied by a design targeted at any other persona, but if the primary persona is the target, all other personas will not, at least, be dissatisfied.
e.g. young people using a general user interface
Secondary persona
Secondary persona is mostly satisfied with the primary persona's interface.
It has specific additional needs that can be accommodated without upsetting the product's ability to serve the primary persona.
Designers should design for the primary, and then adjust the design to accommodate the secondary.
e.g. senior citizens adapting to a general user interface
Supplementary persona
Supplementary persona is other personas that are not primary or secondary.
Their needs are mostly covered by a combination of primary and secondary personas.
It is often included due to stakeholder considerations or accessibility needs (political persona)
e.g. visually impaired users requiring additional accommodations
Customer persona
Customer persona is the person who purchases the product but may not use it directly.
e.g. kids (primary persona) use toys but parents (customer persona) buy toys.
Served persona
Served persona is directly affected by the use of the product.
It is often treated like a secondary persona.
e.g. radiology technologist (primary persona) uses CT scanner, but patients (served persona) are the one who are being used.
Negative persona
Negative persona is a specific types of users that the product is not being built to serve. It is used to set boundaries for product focus.
e.g. Anti-personas (users who intentionally misuse a system)
e.g. spam bots using SNS
User goals: Why did they do that?
- Goal: Deeper reasons behind user actions
- Tasks: Specific actions or steps required to achieve goals
- Solution: Method to complete tasks
Understanding User Goals
Similar to level of cognitive processing (perception of design)!
- Experience goals (Visceral level): how users want to feel
- End goals (Behavioral level): what a user wants to do
- Life goals (Reflective level): what a user wants to be
We might have to consider non-user goals, but we should align them with user goals.
Customer goals, Corporate goals, etc.
Hierarchy of Needs
We should serve low-level needs first, then high-level needs.
- Functionality: working system
- Reliability: stable & consistent performance
- Usability: easy and forgiving design
- Proficiency: do things better than before
- Creativity: interacting in innovative way
c.f. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs (Physilogical - Safety - Love/belonging - Esteem - Self-actualization)
People tries to fulfill low-level needs first, then high-level needs.