Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
In a nutshell, this will be a character representing your user. If this character can use your product, then most of your user base will also be easy to use or accept your product/feature.
For example, if your product is an e-commerce platform aimed at housewives, your User Persona would describe a housewife named Wanda Maximoff. Ms.Wanda will bring all the typical characteristics of a housewife in terms of age, living area, shopping habits, needs, and goals when shopping online…
Because of the close relationship between Persona and users, the more real Persona is, so real that people have a feeling of “imagining”, the higher its effect on the product.
Persona helps you design with a clear vision of your users. It gives shape to your user base and frees you from the murky idea of your users. While giving shape to your user base, validation and quest requirements should also begin to get underway.
In terms of features, it includes details such as
- Year old.
- Job.
- Interests.
- Like/Dislike.
- Other details relevant to the product.
- Sometimes it even includes the personalities of these fictional users.
You can find a lot of different User Persona templates with just one Google Search operation. This is an example of a User persona
Why do we need to create a persona?
Effective communication tool
For the product team, User Persona will create a common language about the user group. The members, from there, will clearly know who the users they design the solution for are, what their personality traits are like, and how they have needs and desires to use instead of letting each person think. individuals create many different versions. Thanks to that, the design process also works more smoothly.
Additionally, when communicating with other teams, Persona makes it easy to explain the rationale for product feature decisions. As a solution provider and designer, solving user problems is one of the top concerns of Designers. And those problems are expressed through Persona.
A guide for product operation
Once your team has become User-centric (putting users at the center), the strategies and decisions from designing, and building products to operating them will definitely always need a User Persona. Specifically:
At the ideation stage, the product team can use Persona to serve for brainstorming and making decisions about solutions based on the problems that users face.
During the product testing phase, Persona will become the criteria for selecting the right participants.
Even in the product communication phase, understanding who the target audience is will help the Marketing or Sales team determine how to approach the right message.
