User Personas are PEOPLE!!!
Meme-emoticonal Advisory : This content contains emojis and memes🙃
A lot of you will agree to this, not my omniscience 😁 — users are people. However, it never reflects in the documents we present to stakeholders. User personas, however fictitious, represent a real set of people. If they represent people, why present them as statistics?
Of course, statistics are very important, however, I believe they should not just be presented or visualized as data.
Let’s get down to the basics🕵…
Interaction Design Foundation defines personas as “fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way”. Thus, user personas are insights in its basic sense. In user-centered design, these insights make Stakeholders empathize deeply with the users. With such empathy, users are a priority before business objectives and goals.
Google defines data as “facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis”.
From these, we can agree that User personas are facts that provide insights about users.🤗
Why visualize them as data?😒
Don’t close the tab, just yet 😏
And, with a bit of photoshop:
You are welcome🤭
As much as this gives us the information we need to know about Donald Trump, it is not sufficient enough to want to know more. Which is the essence of User Personas, really;
To make Stakeholders “want to know more”.
I think that pretty much sums up why we go through hell to get sufficient data to develop richer insights about these users.
I know the pain, but if I may propose…
“Stories give us the opportunity to experience narratives in our imagination as if they were real, and feel raw emotion even though the reality of our experience is only in listening to the story.”
You might have read and heard similar to this a million times but you can’t ignore the importance it has had in our world, especially day-to-day interactions. Stories are how we connect to people. It’s why you love Superman so much! But, I am not going in-depth on that today.
The point is…
When next you want to present or visualize your User Personas, instead of:
Try this:
You can make yours “pop”, but you get the point.
Excuse me, Design Professor😏…
This is not ‘user scenario’ or ‘user story’ as some of you might have assumed. The former only focuses on motivations, needs, barriers while the lattar is often written from the perspective of an end user.
To conclude, I leave with this📢:
Go ye, therefore, to all nations and make stakeholders cry!
