Building the Right Software with Help of the Persona
Nowadays software is something crucial in our life. With the help of software, we can do a job with fewer efforts than we used to. For example, back then we used to send letters using a mailing service and it takes time before the letters received by the receiver, but today we can just use e-mail and the mail will be sent instantly. But what is the correlation between software and personas? I promise you will know the answer after reading this article.
What is Persona?
Persona is a fictional character(s) representing the users that will use the software. Personas are made to understand the needs, behaviors, experiences, and goals of a user to use the software. With that understanding, we will recognize various kinds of users with different needs and expectations. Thus, the software developed is expected to be right on target according to the needs of the users.
Usually, personas consist of one to two pages of the document that contains the following information:
- Name
- Picture
- Demography such as sex, age, status, etc
- Background
- Behavior
- Goals, motivations, and frustrations/pain points
- etc.
With persona, we can build empathy. Empathy is a core value in software design and persona can help to create understanding and empathy with the end-users. Persona provides the directions for making design decisions that will lead us to create the best software for users.
Characteristics of a good persona:
- Personas aren’t fictional guesses at what a target user thinks. A persona must be based on research or observation.
- Personas reflect real user patterns, not different user roles. Personas aren’t a reflection of roles within a system.
- A persona focuses on how users interact with a product (current state), not how users will interact with a product (the future).
- A persona is context-specific (focused on the behaviors and goals related to the specific domain of a product).
How to Create a Persona?
- Collect users’ information: We can do research to collect the users’ information. In this step, we should understand the mindsets, motivations, and behaviors of the users.
- Identify behavioral patterns from research data: The next step is analyzing the result of the research we have done before. The goal is to find patterns in user research data.
- Create personas: In this step, we processing the result of the previous analysis into a persona and describing a persona in such a way that expresses enough understanding and empathy to understand the users.
- Find scenario(s) of interaction and create user personas UX documentation: Personas have no value without the scenarios that tied them up. A scenario is an imagined situation that describes how a persona would interact with a product to achieve its goals.
Here is my software engineering project team’s persona
In the process of development, we should create software that, of course, help the users to make their works easier. To achieve that goal, we should know the characteristics of the users. The persona above, helps us to make better (if not best) decisions while developing the software.
