On our blog, I’ve already discussed how important user personas are for a successful project.
This is a technique that we use frequently at Mammoth-AI. Every new feature we create is scrutinized through the eyes of our user personas, a process that almost always yields new ideas for how to improve our service.
In this essay, I’ll go over user personas in further depth.
There’s a lot of good information out there, but sifting the wheat from the chaff can be difficult if you’re just starting out.
I’ve put together the definitive guide to figuring out what user personas are and how to utilize them to build better products. Continue reading to learn everything there is to know about user personas.
Why User Personas: Getting into your users’ shoes
User personas are the foundation for creating a great user experience.
And providing a great user experience is one of the most important factors in attracting new customers, keeping them, and increasing income.
For a long time, companies relied on demographic data gathered during their market research process to learn more about their customers. Age, gender, and educational attainment… This information, or rather, the overall image that formed, drove product owners’ decisions.
Average data, on the other hand, produces average results.
It’s becoming more crucial to precisely determine what makes your users tick as the software market moves away from the one-size-fits-all model and encourages individual customization.
The long and short of it
Here’s your 6-step cheat sheet to creating great user personas.
- Identify your real users
- Approach them and ask questions
- General background questions
- Skills, knowledge and expertise
- Goals and motivations
- Concerns and objections
- Analyze the data
- Cluster similarities
- Build a model
- Give them a life
Read on to delve into each aspect in more detail.
Better the customer you know
A user persona is more than just data; it’s also a collection of beliefs, behaviors, and connections. These factors cut across your customer base psychologically rather than materially to segment them. As a result, you start characterizing your consumer types with words like “tech smart,” “physically active,” and “early-career professional.”
Each user profile you design will have their own purchase habits, levels of involvement and product knowledge, as well as their own goals and demands. The combination of these aspects will result in a cast of recurrent characters who will engage with your product in unique ways, necessitating a custom marketing, sales, and customer service strategy.
These user personas start to inhabit your UX documents and interact with your product in predictable ways, almost like fictional characters with a life of their own.
It’s similar to writing a TV sitcom, but instead of narrative points, you’re writing product features!
Fleshing out your user personas
The best way to create user personas is to conduct one-on-one interviews with your existing customers or target audience. The process typically starts off with general conversation about the subject’s and gradually becomes more focused on his or her use of your products or services.
Although they could be costly in terms of money and time, the depth of information you can get from these interviews will give you a wealth of material with which to engineer your user personas and make them as realistic as possible.
Although one step removed from the real thing, collecting and analyzing behavioral and qualitative data from your existing consumers is also a good way to create user personas.
Sending links to online surveys and quizzes to your customers or prospects who read your newsletter or sign up for any kind of premium is another low-cost approach. However, I still recommend that you follow up with some leads in person or via Skype/Lync.
Recruiting and dismissing user personas
Over time, you can build a cast of user personas which you can hire for any new project you’re working on at the time. Some personas will star across several projects, others will make a one-time appearance and then retire back into obscurity.
This leads us to an important fact: Not all user personas are created equal.
To wrap our heads around this it’s best to divide customers into core and fringe customers.
The difference between the two isn’t in size (as a matter of fact, you’re more likely to have a small concentration of hardcore fans passionately engaging with your brand and A LOT of fringe customers simply gravitating around your product — this is your long tail) but personality.
In terms of personality, core customers are more homogeneous, but fringe clients have a wider range of personalities. Having a thorough understanding of your consumer base’s “psychological heat map” gives you a competitive advantage.
Defining your user personas
You don’t need to look far to find out the stuff your user personas are. Like the real customers they are based on, user personas have varying levels of openness and skepticism towards new products and features, a fact captured by the innovation diffusion graph.
Some are innovators and early adopters who will snap up new offers the instant they’re available. The majority will take their time to examine the proof before taking on board new things. A select few wills only be persuaded to make use of your products after months of relentless pursuit.
The natural diversity in your consumer base should be reflected in your user personas.
You should also examine how much time your customers spend interacting with your app, what they want to do with it, and how they will personally benefit from it, as well as the device they’re most likely to use to log in.
You shouldn’t just take a picture of your user persona and call it a day. Instead, make an entire photo album!
The past and present of your identity are equally significant. Before they started using yours, what other goods had they been exposed to? What is their relationship with your and competitor’s brands?
After you’ve finished answering these questions, take a real photo of yourself to serve as your user persona’s profile picture. Create a fictional social media account for them, replete with quotes, a list of key influences, and their likes and dislikes, based on the information you gathered about them.
Using your user personas
It’s time to draw the curtains and start the action once your cast of characters is complete. User personas are essential throughout the creative process, and any member of your company’s team can contribute to the development of important insights for your product’s features.
User personas can benefit you in the following ways:
- Build a relationship with customers: Learning to empathize with their pain points and developing ways to resolve them with your product.
- Develop focus: Concentrate on your customer and never take off your eyes from the real prize: their loyalty to your product in the long-term. That’s what’ll keep you in business.
- Communicate better with the team: Over time user personas become a sort of shorthand for a customer type that instantly conjures up a lot of associations that help all team members get on the same page and collaborate better together.
- Justify decisions using your customers’ voice: With user personas you begin taking the role an advocate for customers and make it easier to push aside the challenges that biases and ego tend to pose among professionals, especially the most seasoned ones!
- Measure effectiveness: By making customers’ satisfaction the measure by which a product feature’s success is measured you’ll have a better grasp on which features should be prioritized and made ready for launch before others.
User personas are particularly powerful because they take advantage of people’s innate abilities, such as their predilection for dealing in narratives, with concrete subjects performing specified behaviors for obvious reasons.
This makes it easier to connect with customers on an emotional level and allows for a more holistic approach to decision-making.
Conclusion
It’s all too easy to become so caught up in your own professional objectives and the success of your product that you forget about your customers.
The fundamental advantage of user personas is that they allow you to step outside of your head and experience the world through the eyes of your customers. This not only keeps biases and egos in check, but it also guarantees that IT workers are thinking about the customers who will eventually sign up for, benefit from, and share their experience with the finished product.
For more info: https://www.qaaas.co.uk/testing-services/
Also Read: https://www.guru99.com/software-testing.html