user Persona
Personas are semi-fictional characters, which we create based on our Empathy interviews, to represent the different users that might use our product/service. Creating personas helps to understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals, and identify with the user we are designing the solution for.
Why we need User Persona?
Most of the time, we target multiple user groups with our solution. They could be from different market segment (e.g. mobile is used by the users of different demography), or the users who comes across the process cycle at different stages to play their roles (e.g. Process Automation products). Well-defined personas help with strategizing and making smart design decisions. They make real users memorable for the product team, helping to focus efforts and build empathy.
How is User Persona created?
A user persona is framed from empathy interviews and researching the needs, goals, and observed behavioral patterns of users. It captures following details about our users:
Name: User personas should feel like a real person. Giving them a name is the first step.
Photo: We always want to put a face to a name. Some companies choose to use fictional characters and celebrities as their persona photo, but it's better to create a new and original identity, so as to be free of stereotypes or preconceived traits.
Personal motto: This helps build out our persona to make them feel more realistic.
Bio: A little history of our persona. Where did they grow up? Why did they choose their current job? How do they spend their free time? Include some unique details.
Demographics: Include demographics to help improve our understanding of the user and the target user segment.
Personality traits: Assigning personality traits helps us understand their feeling and expectations. e.g. Do they make impulsive decisions? Are they meticulous in approach?
Motivations: The goal is to understand how our users think. What motivates them to use any product?
Preferred brands and influences: Brands they like and influencers they follow. This helps creating value proposition and communications to influence use's decision.
Goals and frustrations: Persona’s goals (gain points) and frustrations (pain points) that should directly or indirectly relate to the problem we are trying to solve.
user journey
A User journey map is a diagram that depict the stages, touchpoints and emotions a user (persona) go through when interacting with a product or carrying out a process.
User journey is mapped from point of view of the user(s). It captures all the touchpoints and interactions a user makes, while purchasing the product or completing the process cycle. The map captures the emotion of the user at every stage, in order to identify what goes wrong (pain points) or right (gain points) at each touch points. User Journey map breaks down the entire User experience into series of experiences, making it more addressable to solve the pain points at each touchpoints.
Define use cases
The use case is made up of a set of possible sequences of interactions between systems and users in a particular environment and related to a particular goal.
As we moved across the User journey, at each stage, the user has options of alternate paths they can chose. For example, a user can purchase the same product through an online, as well as offline channel . Either of these option will have a separate subsequent actions and environment, with different possibilities of experience and pain points.
Similarly, the application scenarios where we have multiple users across the process cycle (e.g. Process Automations), each user follows a different path, with separate role to play and different actions to take.
These paths are called Use cases. Each Use case has different user environment and pain-points. The respective users have different expectation of end state across these Use cases. Therefore, the pain-points needs to be analyzed, and solution need to devised, for each Use cases.