We have all imagined people in our psyche, whether in our dreams or in a moment of reflection. Young children create them all the time, and with descriptive details too. That is the same kind of energy that UX designers use when creating user personas.
User Personas
A user persona is generally developed from some type of research into demographics or behaviors, but sometimes they can be completely made up. The person that is created can then be used to harbor empathy, which a designer needs in order to be truly successful with their objective. If you don’t know your users, you won’t care about them, and therefore not gear the product/service towards their needs. When developing something for a user, you can then ask yourself, “Would Jackie use this? Would it be easy or would she struggle?”
I decided to create some user personas for Amazon, which was one of the websites that I analyzed earlier. I did one on myself, as a young adult in graduate school, and one about a mother & wife. Ben Ralph, co-founder of Beaker & Flint, developed this excellent guide for creating effective user personas, which I will outline below using Jackie Jones:
Part One: First Impressions
This section is depicted as the header of this post.
Part Two: Motivation and Behavior
Part Three: Influencers and Environment
My full user persona assessment can be found here:
References:
Comments