Whether you’re a small business owner or a large corporation working on a massive marketing campaign, a UX persona can increase your profitability margin exponentially. UX designers take these profiles of your target audience and create custom User Experiences that help make them, your target user or client, feel supported, intrigued, excited, etc. (Or whatever else you want them to feel, ya digg?)
Seems like a no brainer, right? Well… for the UX designer creating a persona isn’t just a good idea, it’s a friggin must.
What is a UX Persona?
UX personas are an important tool for your team to understand who your user is, what their particular needs are, and the problems that lead them to requiring your services and/or products. Likewise, a UX persona will also help your team’s efforts in creating a usable product or feature specific to the needs of real people.
Of course we understand (and it’s important to note) that your product or service is not just specifically made for one person or one type of need. For example, people from all walks of life suffer from sleep apnea, and a company serving the needs of those communities will have very different patient profiles. One patient could be super tech savvy and love the ease of a more efficient CPAP, whereas another patient may want the simple, not so technical CPAP because they get easily overwhelmed by too many options. A good UX design team will encourage their clients to create more than one UX persona for their product and/or service if multiple target demographics exist.
Simple Steps Every UX Designer Should Know (About Personas):
When it comes to creating UX personas every designer does it differently. However, there are a few aspects every designer should address. Your typical who, what, where, when, why format can get you started. And remember, these don’t have to be “real” people, just based on real life issues. Get creative!
Who is the person? (Name & Age)
What does he/she do for his/her occupation? (Work Life)
Where does he/she work at? (Location & Space)
When does he/she work? (Schedule)
Why is this person perfect for your service/product? (Relevance/Context)
Once you’ve created the personal aspects of your persona, you can move into different subgroups to create multiple personas. For example, determining their specific needs and goals, their workspace details, and personal history/background.
Perhaps that sleep apnea patient works graveyard shifts and her needs are different from a patient that works day shifts. One persona can be a female, the other a male, and both the same age; or all personas can be the same sex but different ages and so on and so forth.
Each UX persona has different wants, expectations, beliefs, and goals. In its essence, a UX persona is a description of the user. While the persona is “not a real person” per say, the needs, wants, beliefs, frustrations, and expectations definitely are. We recommend doing some research on your users before diving into creating your personas.
Below is an example of a UX persona that we made for one of our clients: Apria Direct…
As you can tell this persona is based off a 58 year old male who is a sleep apnea patient. Chuck is a construction worker who likely works long hours and sometimes graveyard shifts. His sleep patterns of course fluctuate according to his employment and we can grasp from his frustrations that in general he’s just a busy man who can’t have too many steps in his daily routine added to what his work life. We can gather from this persona that an automated refill order for his CPAP supply would best suit him. We can also gather that the refills should be shipped directly to his address in order to save him the time and inconvenience of insurance and billing processes, and of course remembering to PICK UP those refills.
Lastly, we’d like to zone in on some key differences between user personas and buyer personas.
Buyer Personas v. User Personas
Buyer personas are focused on sales and are developed by quantitative research. Your team’s research can help define the brand’s marketing message/slogan, product targeting, and content strategy. Buyer personas also aide in determining how your product will resonate in the marketplace and provide insight to your brand strategy. Essentially, buyer personas can help you initially attract a customer to your brand.
User personas are focused on habits and behavior, and are developed through qualitative research of much smaller/niche groups. User personas help define what the user would want and need in real life to reach their specific goals. This type of persona will aide in determining the context of use for your product/service and the typical behaviors of your users. User personas help your brand keep a customer once they’re interested.
At CreateApe we’re all about understanding your users and creating designs that make their experience that much more personal and relatable. . We also take pride in working out the efficiency measures needed for your users to navigate your website or mobile app with ease.. Through UX personas we’re able to create a unique space for your users that’s specifically made to match their needs–because, let’s face it, we’re tired of hearing about users going bananas over sites that are difficult to navigate, understand, and use!
