Common mistakes while making User Personas
What are Personas? How are they useful?
Personas are realistic representations of the target users of a product that is created based on user research. This helps in understanding the psyche of the users. Personas are created in order to gain some insights into user’s needs and wants. A persona is sketched as an individual; however, it is a representation and not a real person. Personas are crucial while determining the design and functionalities of a product before starting the actual development of the product.
Common mistakes done by product managers during persona identification:
· Not conducting enough research: Often while building the personas, designers or product teams fall short off collecting enough user data that is required to create accurate personas. They might overlook users’ motivations & frustrations, and can become biased and, the need assessment could become self-influenced. This creates a gap between user’s aspirations and a designer’s assumptions about users. If personas are created based on the internal data, then it must be tested and validated to bridge the gap.
· Too many personas: Creating too many buyer personas will mitigate the focus of fulfilling the user’s needs and too much time would be spent on catering wants of all the personas. Prioritizing important personas and eliminating redundant ones can help us in achieving the ideal number of user personas. A product manager can use MECE i.e. ‘mutually exclusive collectively exhaustive approach to create a portfolio of personas. Though, it is difficult to come up with exact no of personas for a product, 3–4 personas are usually deemed sufficient across the industry.
· Not including negative personas: Negative personas are opposite to those of buyer personas. They are the not so ideal users who will never materialize into customers. It is a good practice to have a negative persona as it will help to efficiently focus time, energy and resources, and not spend time on strategizing for the users who will be a bad fit for the business.
· Depending too much on demographics: Demographics like age, gender, income, education, living location gives a good first idea about the user persona. The persona is incomplete without information like desire, goals, fears, habits, feelings, etc. A qualitative data in user personas would help in creating an effective blueprint to interact with the potential users.
Do we really need user personas?
Personas help in empathizing with customers while designing a product or a new feature. The limitations with personas are that even when users fall under the same persona, they can behave differently while using the actual product, thus rendering personas unreliable for taking design and marketing decisions. A user persona is a great tool to let the stakeholders get into the shoes of their customers and to have a reference to how users think. However, the stakeholders may not understand the importance of personas since they may already have a preconceived notion about the target users and their behaviors.
On the flip side, since personas cater to categorical user needs constraining the opportunities to innovate. Sticking close to personas, designers are more inclined to just solve known bottlenecks and not investigate the problems that were never there.
Conclusion
Instead of getting consumed in the personas, the focus should be on the interaction with users and the data collection and analysis. Chances are the user personas won’t be referred by clients and design team while making decisions, but as a product manager who creates awesome products, you should keep personas in context while decision making. Study persona patterns to reinvent the personas and make them usable. And always remember to check your persona hypothesis via user testing.
