User personas
A user persona (also customer persona, user type, archetype) in human-computer design is a fabricated profile used to represent realistic aspects of the user or customer segment intended to use certain applications, websites, or other digital products. [1] Personas embody important aspects of the users they are intended to describe and meant to personify user data. [2] User personas are a method of taking a diverse and complex audience and summarizing all of their data into a few archetypes that sum up their needs and desires. [3] While a popular method of representing hypothesized users, personas can be an incredibly powerful tool for designing products if done properly. However, those creating personas must be cautious of stereotype and classification implications.
In the user-centered design community specifically, user personas help user experience designers, researchers, product managers, and more when it comes to making design decisions for their products. A user persona profile typically includes an imaginary name, picture, and summary of various attitudes, behaviors, and goals for the user that it is trying to portray. [4] There is no standard template for creating user personas; therefore, they can be used to represent various characteristics of users. Ultimately, user personas visualize a broad range of qualitative and quantitative data that can later be used in the problem solving processes in various industries.
Contents
History
User personas were coined by Alan Cooper, an American software designer and programmer best known for Visual Basic, user experience, and interaction design (5). Cooper proposed the idea of user personas while working on a software related project. As Cooper worked through design problems of his own, he realized that there was a gap between software authors and the actual users that would be using the products. As reported in his first book, __, he realized the question to be asked was “how do users interact with this?” Up until this point, software had been constructed in a way that focused on the way to code and not the way to design in order to meet user needs. Copper began to use a persona role-playing technique while navigating his own design problems, thus ideating the first types of user personas.
As Cooper began developing his user persona methodology, he began spreading his new insight to other companies in the software industry. By focusing on design methodologies, Cooper started articulating some of his own design principles that would later make up the foundation of user personas. The common theme was that products should be designed with the users’ needs as the priority. In 1999, user personas were publicly introduced in Cooper’s book The Inmates are Running the Asylum [5]. User personas quickly gained popularity in the online business and technology world after this breakthrough. In the book, Cooper provided an overview of persona qualities, use cases, and other recommendations for creating personas. Today, Cooper’s user centered design strategies are accepted widely across the human-computer interaction industry. As user personas have become more widespread, they have become more developed and different strategies have come to existence.
Creation Process
Original user personas were just initial rough sketches from Alan Cooper; however, they have now evolved to incorporate data and become more detailed characters (7). Now, they are typicaly a one-page design tool that visualizes user information. Personas are not an end all be all for solving design problems. Instead, they are a way to help explain and communicate different user needs. Before creating user personas, designers tend to conduct quantitative and qualitative research in order to gather enough data to adequately represent the users they are designing for. Relevant data is then organized into personal types based on common desires, characteristics, and pain points. From there, teams can begin turning their user information into user personas.
User experience designers and researchers will vary the exact process for constructing personas, but personas tend to follow the same phases (8). In the CareerFoundry UX Bootcamp course, industry professionals encourage designers to include four key pieces of information when it comes to crafting their user personas. (9)
Header
User personas tend to include a header area that contains a fictional name, image, and/or quote to summarize the most important need for the user. Providing a name and image helps personify the persona which helps make it feel more like a real person and helps to make it memorable for the team to work on. The name and image can be entirely made up, but the quote is derived from user research.
Demographic profile
In addition to the quote, demographic information is factual and drawn from research. It can include a user’s personal background like their age, gender, education, ethnicity, or family status. An example demographic profile might be: Savannah, 52 years old, divorced mother of two, has a Master’s degree in chemistry. Demographic profiles can also include professional aspects of users such as their income level, occupation, and other professional experience. Example: Savannah works full-time at a pharmaceuticals company and earns around $65,000 per year. Other demographic components include user environment, how they interact with the product, and psychographics, how users feel, act, and behave towards certain products.
End goals
Since user personas were created as a way to communicate user needs, including end goals in a persona ensures that products are designed in a way that help users fulfill their needs.
Scenario
Lastly, user personas tend to include a short, descriptive narrative that details how a user’s interaction with the product in a certain way would help fulfill their goals.
A general rule of thumb when finalizing user personas is to avoid extra details that would not explicitly help make a design decision later on.
Data-Driven Personas
As user personas became a common design method and it became relatively easy for businesses to create, there was a shift towards more data-driven personas that focused on real customer data and not just a subset of user research (10). Data-Driven personas are user personas that are created algorithmically from user behavior and demographic data. In “Data-driven persona development,” Jennifer McGinn and Nalini Kotamraju suggest that researchers should create and valid personas through a statistical analysis of data. These data-driven personas take user data and quantitative methods and create personas in an inexpensive and quick manner. Additionally, it removes the time that designers spend creating personas themselves. (11)
Benefits
User personas have been beneficial to the design process for various reasons according to Pruitt and Adlin (12). Personas are often used as a communication tool for engineers, designers, and product managers to work with user data and use it to inform their design decisions. As companies adopt their own method of incorporating user personas into their process, personas make different user types easily memorable.
Spotify, a company known for its established design team, spent 2 years developing 5 personas using Alan Cooper’s method and the Grounded Theory approach (13).
Spotify incorporated the five personas into their entire design workspace by creating cardboard cutouts, card games, and digital aspects like ‘Which Persona Are You?” Spotify instantly saw beneficial impact to using the personas; they help create educated hypotheses that eventually save the design team time from doing redundant user research. Spotify saw such promising benefits after creating their personas that they plan to expand and adapt their user personas for their different international markets outside the US.
User personas are not exclusively beneficial for large companies; personas can help make design decisions at any level. At the core, user personas can help build empathy for users being designed for. Creating personas helps developers and designers gain a better understanding of the user and think about them as an actual person (14). This allows designers to think about what an actual person might want or need from their perspective. Additionally, having an empathetic approach towards personas pushes designers to design the best product for their users since they are identifying with the personas.
Another benefit is that user personas can help make quick design decisions without relying on spending time and money on user research. When it comes to prioritizing features, designers will consider the goals of the business to a certain extent, but they can also influence their decisions based on how well the feature would address the wants and needs of their user personas.
Ethical Concerns
User personas are seen as a common design process component in the human computer interaction industry, but there are some criticisms regarding algorithmic persona creation with data-driven personas and designer bias.
Algorithmic persona creation
Scholars have been critical of data-driven personas specifically as they rely on algorithmic decision-making systems that tend to overlook various user characteristics. Ethical concerns that have risen over data-driven personas include aspects like fairness, privacy, transparency, and trust (16). Ethics surrounding algorithmic design has been explored in the past, but there is limited research on data-driven personas specifically. Machine learning and automation have a consensus in the computer science and human computer interaction field as having ethical issues, and data-driven personas have used machine learning and automation (17).
The goal of quantifying personas is to create more accurate user personas from real data, but ethical ramifications are often overlooked when personas are created. One concern when dealing with large sums of data in persona creation is stereotyping personas into certain categories. Race, for example, is a characteristic that personas default to having. Racial stereotypes can have an impact when creating personas from data and data-driven personas can become politicized (18). Scholars are currently researching ways to satisfy fairness and non-discrimination while making data-driven personas from group demographics.
Something about classification systems. Taking user data and classifying it into different persona categories (Sorting Things out chapter 6)
Designer Bias
When designers are creating user personas manually and not relying on data centric approaches, critics claim that this could introduce personal bias of those creating them.
The Elastic User: In About Face 2.0, Alan Cooper described the elastic user as an ill-defined persona that fluctuates depending on the needs of the developer or designer.
Self-referential design
Designers and researchers may subconsciously create user personas with their own identities or mental models in mind. As a result, if there is not a diverse set of voices involved in creating personas then they can be unrepresentative of the real user population.- ↑ Pruitt, J., Grudin, J.: Personas: practice and theory. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Designing for User Experiences, San Francisco, California, USA, pp. 1–15. ACM (2003). https://doi.org/10.1145/997078.997089
- ↑ An, J., Kwak, H., Salminen, J., Jung, S., Jansen, B.J.: Imaginary people representing real numbers: generating personas from online social media data. ACM Trans. Web (TWEB) 12 (4), 1–26 (2018)
- ↑ Salminen, J., et al.: From 2,772 segments to five personas: summarizing a diverse online audience by generating culturally adapted personas. First Monday 23, 8415 (2018). https:// doi.org/10.5210/fm.v23i6.8415
- ↑ Nielsen, L., Hansen, K.S., Stage, J., Billestrup, J.: A template for design personas: analysis of 47 persona descriptions from Danish industries and organizations. Int. J. Sociotechnol. Knowl. Dev. 7, 45–61 (2015). https://doi.org/10.4018/ijskd.2015010104
- ↑ Cooper, A.: The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity. Sams - Pearson Education, Indianapolis (1999)
