How to create more valid User Personas
Before starting any design or development project, it’s crucial to know and define precisely who the service is being designed for. User Personas are a great way of documenting your key audiences, their needs, context, frustrations and motivations for using your product or service.
Although they can be incredibly helpful, User Personas have gotten kind of a bad reputation over the years in the field of UX Design, largely through teams hurrying the process and skipping the key steps required. Often User Personas are created without any real research taking place, so end up representing the hunches and assumptions of key stakeholders, rather than an informed representation of users. In this post, we explore some of the common pitfalls with User Personas and how to create more valid, informed User Personas.
What are User Personas and why are they important?
Usually a digital product (like a website or app) or service will be designed with a specific set of end users and use cases in mind. For something like a bank, a website will need to cater to a pretty wide range of needs - from helping those researching their next current account, to making it easy for business owners apply for a loan. People in each of these contexts clearly have different needs, and so will be in need of different information, tools and functionality to complete the job they want to.
User Personas act as a tool to cluster together observations and truths about these audiences and their needs audiences so designers know precisely what problems they need to solve for the end user. Done correctly, they’re a brilliant tool for building shared consensus from key stakeholders about the overall purpose and vision for your product. Done badly, they can result in designing to solve for problems that don’t exist or reflect the biases of stakeholders within the organisation. Let’s explore some of these issues in more detail as well as opportunities to sidestep them and improve the validity of your User Research.
Conduct Primary research to understand context, thoughts and attitudes
At We Are Engines, we’re fortunate enough to work with a number of organisations that are huge advocates of user-centred design. As a result, they recognise the value of proper audience research. However, it’s often the case in the design world that User Personas represent little more than a glorified set of hunches about the needs of the end user.
Put simply, if you’re not talking to your users, key stakeholders or watching users actually use your product, you’re not practicing UX Design and run the risk of creating poorly defined, bloated products. All too often, User Research is skipped, leading to an ill-informed view of audience needs. Here are practical tips on conducting primary User Research. To overcome some of these challenges, primary research is key:
Conduct depth interviews with your customers. There’s no real replacement for talking to end-users when it comes to unearthing key insights. Prepare a high-level discussion guide with the key questions you’d like to address in your research, and schedule time to talk with your users. This is your opportunity to understand their context for using the product; when, where and why they typically use your service and how they feel about it. If you can’t physically be with a customer, arrange a time that suits them to conduct an interview remotely. Remote User Research is an increasingly popular, cost-effective means of taking to your customers and is certainly better than not conducting research at all.
Survey a larger sample to investigate attitudes further. Surveys don’t provide the ability to be explorative in your research, but you can use this to form a wider understanding of a group of users behaviours and attitudes on a larger scale. Use open-ended questions to provide users with the chance to answer your questions as they wish.
Talk to stakeholders in the organisation. Gaining the trust and buy-in of stakeholders is critically important to developing an insider’s understanding of how the business attempts to meet user needs. Schedule one to one interviews with key stakeholders from a variety of departments and gather as much insight from them as possible on how they view the end user and their needs.
Use secondary sources to understand macro-trends
While it’s incredibly insightful learning about what your customers think or feel about your product, it’s critically important to consider your findings in relation to other data. Secondary desk research is an important part of the process, as it provides you with an unbiased insight into trends around consumer behaviour and the ability to tap into broader trends that might be shaping user needs. Here are a few helpful sources to consider consulting:
Customer reviews. Reviews can give you great insight into aspects of the overall User or Brand Experience that are either positive and negative. Mine whatever reviews you can find, be it on Google, TripAdvisor, Facebook, TrustPilot or wherever is relevant. Analysing review data en-masse can be tricky, but tools like Meltwater can help make this process significantly faster by identifying sentiment within review data through artificial intelligence. It’s not always perfect, but it’s a great source of insight and will help you drill into areas for further exploration with users.
Consult market research reports. If you can afford it, it’s hard to beat sources such as Mintel for market research reports. If you don’t have budget to buy reports, dig around Google and you’ll almost certainly find market research reports into the area you’re exploring. These can be a great way of identifying macro-trends than might be shaping the market.
Conduct keyword research. Keyword research is a massively underrated market research method. Unlike interviews or surveys, the data you’re mining isn’t subject to researcher bias - it’s a direct line to what users are searching for. Use keyword research to get an idea of the types of questions users have in relation to your brand, service or market. It’s honestly a goldmine, and critically important when it comes to developing a more rounded account of user needs. Later down the line, keyword research can also be invaluable in helping you define your Information Architecture of content requirements.
Utilise website analytics. Dig deeply into ‘Audience’ reports in Google Analytics for descriptive data about the composition of your website’s audience. Create Advanced Segments to explore what different demographics do on the site; the content they consume, the actions they take. You might find for instance that people aged X in Y location use the website totally different to other segments. Digital Analytics can provide you with trend information that can be expored as part of further qualitative research with your end users.
Consider digging into Social analytics. Another under-utilised source of audience data is Facebook Insights. Facebook provides you with a wealth of data around the types of pages your users follow, their age, location and much, much more. Use this source to understand what kinds of things the audience is interested in - it’ll give you an idea of media consumption and brand affiliations the audience(s) have.
Always test your product with current and prospective users
A lot of companies jump into the design process without ever taking the time to understand how well the existing solution meets user needs. A single round of usability testing, whether lab-based usability testing or remote usability testing, can yield more insight than literally weeks of desk research. There’s simply no replacement for observing either current or prospective users using your product.
There are a range of options when it comes to carrying out testing or your product. Unmoderated remote user testing can be quick and relatively inexpensive, but the insights gained from this won’t match those you’ll get from either in-person moderated testing or remote moderated user testing. By moderating a usability testing session, you can probe into issues your users may be having and find out more about their thoughts and challenges in real time.
Don’t make it up - do your research
It ought to go without saying - User Research is critical to developing valid, usable User Personas. Without research to inform you of the needs of your users, your product vision and overall UX strategy will be poorly defined, leaving you open to a plethora of risks. Take the time to carry out User Research early on to develop proper User Personas early, and validate your assumptions as you go.
If you have any questions about the role of User Personas in UX Design or would like the help of an experienced Freelance UX Consultant, get in touch.
