User Personas

Day 9 of 365 of my daily design challenge.

Remember the days when software was shipped to shelves on CDs and version updates were big events? Imagine deploying your code cost your company millions in commercial efforts. Designing products has come a long way since then and despite the best practices and processes that have emerged, there are still a lot of organizations who bastardize these methods and operate like it’s 1998.

Fine, if you’re going to white-knuckle your way to success, at least adopt user personas. Don’t just adopt them - print them out, hang them on the walls all over your office. Print them on a deck of playing cards (don’t actually do that). The point is that user personas should be referenced at every critical point when testing your ideas.

Too often - and I’m guilty of this myself - do we try to use our own point of reference and experience to recall our user’s needs. And too often this leads to cognitive dissonance between what your user’s goals are and what your product is trying to solve.

User personas should be short and focused and consist of your findings from real-world interviews with your users. When I reference my users, I like to focus on the following synthesis: Personality traits, a short biography about who they are as it relates to the problem space, their goals and their frustrations. EZPZ.

Now go forth and continue learning about your users.

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