You’re Wasting Your Time When Designing an Application Without Creating Personas
This article is made for the Software Project course assignment, Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia
As you can see on the title, if you’re designing an application without creating persona, you will waste your time.
The question is why we will waste our time if we don’t create a persona?
Before answer the question above, we need to know what is persona and what is it purpose on design process.
About Persona
Persona is a fictional character that we created to represent different kind of users that will use our application based on the result of our research. Personas help us to understand our user’s needs, behaviors, goals, and experiences. Personas will help us to determine how our design will be because we know what kind kind of users that we design for. Personas will also help us through the ideation process for our design.
When designing an application, we want our application to have a good user experience for the user. One of the way to achieve that is by implement User-Centered Design. User-Centered Design is a design process that focus on the user and their needs. To know what our user’s needs is by making personas.
Here is the example of persona.
A good persona should at least consist these information:
- Photo
- Biography (name, age, gender, job, and location)
- Short background/description about the user
- Goals
What the user want to achieve with using this application? - Tasks
What tasks that user trying to complete using this application? - Frustrations
What things that hindered the user for completing the tasks?
What user problems that currently still have not solved yet?
How to create a good persona
- Do a user research. We can qualitative research (for example, using an online form) or quantitative research (for example, do an interview with some peoples). We can ask many questions that will show their behavior when do some tasks that can be done using our application or their characteristics.
- Analyze the research result. We can make some of group of respondents based on something they have in common or some patterns. For example, from our data, we know that most of the respondents that are a teenage don’t like a website that has so many color that make them confuse when visiting that website. From that, we can make a group of users that are teenage who don’t like a colorful website.
- Create personas that at least consist some of information that I already mentioned in above. When you create personas, make sure you create some personas that represent each different kind of your users.
Example of designing an application based on the persona
On my Software Development course’s project, my team will be develop an application that will be used by our client’s shop (admin) to sell aquaculture items to distributors. So we have two personas, one for admin and one for distributor. Here is the admin persona.
From the persona above, we know that one of the goal of our admin named Carvin is to see a sales statistics for each day. Furthermore, Carvin doesn’t like an UI that is too complex. From that informations, we should implement simple UI design that easy to understand for our application and we need to show sales statistics that easy to read like this.
From the design above, we already provide some of what Carvin needs.
I give you another example of designing an application based on the persona. This following example is for a financial management application. Here is the persona example.
From the persona in above, we can see that Cintya needs a informative financial record and she has kind of bad memory. From that informations, we should provide a UI where the financial record needs to be informative and simple so Cintya can look at her financial record and understand it easily because if the design has too much information, Cintya will be hard to understand and she will not get any information then the financial record itself becomes not informative. So our financial record page design should be like this.
From the design in above, we see that the financial record page (on the left) is very minimalist, simple, and informative. The design also divide financial record items based on date and user can filter the financial record based on the type (date interval, income, spending, and its category). The design doesn’t forget to provide total income and spending so user doesn’t need to calculate manually.
Moving to the left design, the financial record item detail. We see the detail informations that are shown in the page is very easy to retrieve by user. There is no unnecessary information in there.
With these design, we already provide some of Cyntia needs.
What If We Don’t Create a Persona?
If we don’t create personas, we don’t know what exactly our user’s needs and frustrations, how is our application design should be, what informations we need to show on our design. If we don’t know those things, it will be hard to achieve a good user experience for our users. We will wasting our time on design phase because we take a lot of time just to think what our user’s needs and frustrations, and other things. We can’t just guess like that because sometimes designer and user have a different perception. If we just guessing and after we do a usability testing we know that our guess is wrong, we need to revise our design and it is not effective and waste of time.
Conclusion
Now we know what is persona, why we need it when we designing an application so we won’t waste a lot of our time. Make sure you create your personas before start designing.
This is the end of this article, hope this can help you for designing an application.
