The Ultimate Meaning to Personas and Why You Should be Excited

A persona is a fictional meaning of a target segment that you are designing your service for. It embodies the functional, social and emotional aspects of a human being.

Personas continue to be used extensively among Design Thinkers and User Experience (UX) designers. All in all, personas are relevant and effective when create and presented appropriately. Before we advocate our case for personas, we would like to elaborate on the difference between a "profile" of a customer and a "persona" (what we are experts in).

 Example of Persona Mindy Chan- Shoppaholic with Passion to Help

A "profile" is determined mainly by one’s buying behaviour and is developed based on demographics (age, location, race, gender etc). It is generally easy to dissect due to distinct hard facts and numbers, and easy to search for when you conduct customer interviews. Though they may come in handy when dissecting sales analytics and conducting customer interviews, this is not what we are interested in today.

Today, we share our passion and strong case for personas!

"Personas" is the root word for "personality" and is determined mainly based on user needs, behaviours, motivations, lifestyle and personality. It is extremely qualitative and rich- personas give guidance to design teams on how to actually design for people. Though quick and stereotypical, they are built on hours of contextual inquiries and user interviews.

So why do we get so excited about personas?

Firstly, it builds empathy. Building a persona helps you visualise and feel the pains and needs of your user. The user you are designing for is no longer a statistic but a real person with real needs and aspirations. When developing ideas, it is easy for one to fall in love with your own idea and continue the process in a self-referential manner. A persona takes your bias out of the design and focuses your solution on the user, ensuring that a real need is met.

Secondly it aligns the team by building a common understanding of user needs. Meetings and discussions over ideas and products can be streamlined to focus on the persona needs. This maybe exceptionally useful when you need to convince a senior stakeholder of a design decision. Essentially, a well-developed persona can be used when your team maps out its strategy all the way to product/service implementation. Some teams do this by displaying their personas all over the office (even in washrooms) to help team members form a connection to the personas and design with greater empathy.

Have "Anna Lee- Thrifty Fashionista" pasted in your office- How might we design for her?

So now, how do we create these personas that we vouch so passionately for? Interviews, interviews, interviews!

Talk to your users, get to know them and ask them lots of questions. Then identify patterns in users’ responses and build an affinity map. Cluster pain points, behaviours, goals and expectations to build an archetypal model based on clusters seen. Then map these insights into a persona template.

Remember that behavioural traits exist beyond demographics. A 65 year old senior executive may share similar traits to a 35 year old mother, eventually forming 1 persona. Give a nickname to the persona so that people can frame their minds, ie Thrifty Fashionista Anna Lee or Geeky Nerd David.

Build your persona according to its profile and lifestyle, characteristics, goals and ambition, behaviours and habits, fears and challenges, as well as influences.

Personas can be as simple as a drawing with some key words.

Remember, personas are fun and humanise our design process!

Last Words

I will be adding more articles on Design Thinking throughout the year. Articles of Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test will be added periodically to give my readers a broader insights to Design Thinking.

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About the Author

Daniel Ling is a regional Design Leader, and certified Design and Agile Coach with 15 years of experience in the financial and e-commerce tech space- who moulded himself to be a “designer in a business suit”- strong in the Design Thinking process and yet relevant to the industry. He is proficient in the digital and transformational space- in the area of design leadership and management, research, strategy planning and coaching.

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