One of the most important considerations in user experience design (UX) is focusing on the user of the website or application you are designing. A pair of tools to help UX designers keep the user in mind are personas and scenarios.
What Are Personas?
Personas are descriptions of fictional users of a product. They are brief, only one or two pages, with a photo, vital statistics, a short bio, and other information relevant to the project. These descriptions are made up from a pool of answers from real users who participated in surveys and interviews. Because they are created early in the design process, personas can be a useful tool to keep the project on track.
What Are Scenarios?
Scenarios are the settings for the stories told about users and the way they use a website or app. UX designers use them for usability testing and for ideation when coming up with new ideas for a design. Scenarios can be simple and task-focused or more complicated and incorporating more detail.
What Is the Purpose of Creating Personas and Scenarios?
Personas and scenarios are useful tools that help a design team figure out who their users are, help them identify with the user, and keep the design on track. They are built from information collected during interviews and surveys of potential users and they help the team determine exactly who their target audience is and what their goals and motivations are.
Another important role for personas and scenarios is helping build empathy for users. When the team creates and uses these stories, it gives the user a face and an environment, even if it is a fictitious one, and that helps the team identify with the user. Being able to see the product from the user’s perspective is important for user-focused design.
These tools help designers make user-centered design decisions and create features to support the user’s needs and desires as expressed through the persona and scenario. This helps the designers avoid Self-referential design, which is a situation where the team ends up designing the product they would like instead of focusing on the user.
What Makes a Good Persona?
Every aspect of a persona’s description should relate to data collected during the research phase. The data from interviews and observations is analyzed to find patterns, which are used to build the persona because they reflect patterns, not roles. It is also important to avoid stereotypes when constructing personas and to make them very specific and not too general. If the character is too generic it can cause a phenomenon called an elastic user, where each team member envisions their own idea of the user and the design suffers.
Successful personas are context-specific, that is they are focused on using the product. They also describe actions in the present, not the future. The focus should be on what the user wants now, not what they might desire later.
Creating a Persona
The first step in creating a persona is to collect information about users through interviews and observations because personas are based on data. If your budget and schedule don’t allow for direct research, use analytics, customer information, and competitive intelligence to create provisional personas until you can collect your own data.
The next step is to analyze patterns in your findings and identify behavioral variables. A group of six to eight variables makes up a trend and these trends should be the focus of the persona.
Use enough detail to make the persona realistic but not so much as to be distracting and make sure the details are relevant to the design. If you identify several trends, you can have more than one persona, but identify one as the primary persona
What to Include When Creating a Persona?
Start your persona with a header including the following:
- Name – This is made up. Never use real identifying information in a persona.
- Photo – Find a stock image that fits the description of your ideal user.
- Quote – This is a sentence or two that sums up the persona’s personality.
Next, supply some demographics for your persona based on your research findings. This should include the following:
- Personal background – Gender, age, location, marital status, family
- Professional background – Occupation and income
- User environment – This is the physical surroundings where they would use the product and the technology they have available, i.e. devices.
- Psychographics – Likes and dislikes, attitudes, habits, frustrations, needs, and motivations
The next section includes the user’s goals and needs, the things that inspire them to action. You should also include their frustrations, sometimes called pain points. There are templates and tools available online to help you create personas and scenarios. George Olsen developed a tool called the Persona Creation and Usage Toolkit with instructions and a list of points that should be considered when creating personas.
How to Use Scenarios
Once you have your personas, place the primary persona in a scenario, a situation where the persona would use the website or app. The persona is the main character in the story, the lead actor. The goal is what the actor wants to do, and the scenario is the setting of the story. Together they create a narrative that describes how the persona behaves in the situation. From here, you can create a journey map to help with the design. Ultimately, specific personas and scenarios can also help you find test subjects when the product gets to the prototype and testing phase.
Where to Learn UX Design
If you would like to learn more about UX/UI design in order to switch to a new career, one of the best ways to do that is to sign up for classes. You can choose classes that meet in-person or online to learn design software and other applications. Some people prefer to attend brick-and-mortar sessions when learning new information, but that isn’t always available. Live online classes have a similar set-up with a real-time, remote instructor who can answer questions and take control of your monitor—with permission—to show you how to do things. Training is part or full-time and available weekdays, weeknights, or weekends.
The best way to prepare for a career shift to a field like UX design is to enroll in a bootcamp or certificate program. These are intensive training courses that run from a few weeks to a few months and will cover motion graphics and animation in much more depth than tutorials can. Another plus of training is that you will leave class with a professional-quality sample video portfolio that you can show to prospective employers.
Conclusion
It’s easy to learn UX design and start a new career. Check out Noble Desktop’s UX design classes. Choose between in-person sessions in NYC at Noble’s location or sign up for live online UX design courses and attend from anywhere. Use Noble Desktop’s Classes Near Me to find other UX design bootcamps in your area.