UX Personas

One elementary key to achieve customer-centricity is to invest in UX Design heavily.

Data-Driven UX personas ensure that everyone involved in the process understands who they are designing for. They create empathy within the design team, helping them to understand the experience from a user perspective.

Even though Personas are fictive, they always should be based on real data and research. So-called empirical personas will leave no room for guesswork or human bias.
Non-empirical personas always carry the danger that they steer everyone in the wrong direction. If you plan to launch a new product, looking at the overall market and competitors often provides sufficient information to create data-driven personas.

The creation of UX personas should not necessarily be the responsibility of the UX team alone. Data scientists or analysts who can sort and manage the data will be the biggest asset to extract the information required to build profound personas.

If personas are data-driven, it prevents the UX team from falling into two of the most common pitfalls – elastic users and self-referential design. Avoiding self-referential design, meaning the designer designs the UX based on personal experience and preferences, is one of the persona’s key benefits. Also, distributing the personas throughout the entire company will ensure that everyone has the same understanding of the users and not creating elastic users.

Various components of the persona profile contain valuable information for the UX team to create the best user experience.

Before we look at the different components and how they can assist your UX team, let us first highlight the UX personas’ importance on a strategic level. If UX personas do not exist, the team faces the challenge of understanding who they are designing for – if you try to design for everyone, you end up designing for no one.

Whether you end up with 2, 5, or 10 personas, it provides guidance on whom to focus on and allocate resources accordingly.

Trying to design individually for every persona might be a mammoth task; however, it is often worth the effort as these incredible persona stats show. Do not try to do everything simultaneously – focus on your most essential personas and develop the UX accordingly.

Let us look at how the different UX persona components impact the success of the UX design.

UX Persona Picture & Name

It might sound subtle but having a real picture of a person in front of you is the first step for building empathy. Print out the personas and hang them on the wall where everyone sees them. Providing the team with a picture and name will make the first impression, just as in real life.

Demographics in UX personas

Age, income, sex, etc., are crucial information, providing a starting point for the UX team and may also be used as parameters for future A/B tests to assess the developed UX in segments.

Once you created the specific persona UX, the demographics can be used to set up PPC campaigns to drive traffic accordingly.

UX Persona Bio

UX personas help build empathy and understanding of a company’s customer clusters, as mentioned initially.

Providing the story around the personas makes them much more tangible for everyone involved. It gives the team a grip on who she is how her life looks like.

UX Persona Needs

If you know what’s needed, it is easier to provide it, would you agree? Different personas have different needs, and identifying them will prioritize the to-dos for the team accordingly.

Tackling congruent needs/requirements between all personas might have a massive impact on your customer journey. In a perfect world, the UX should not follow a one size fits all approach but address the individual needs of the different personas to maximize personalization and enhance customer-centricity.

UX Persona – Emotion Based UX Design

Identifying emotions and the reason behind them drive empathy and understanding for the whole team.

As a result, the team can adjust the UX accordingly to enhance positive and avoid negative emotions.

UX Persona Go-Tos

This component is closely related to the needs section. Identifying the needs is step one, but the ultimate goal is to develop a UX that addresses them.

A Go-to section gives the team guidance on how the identified needs should be fulfilled accordingly.

UX Persona – Representativeness

Many times, deciding what is most important is challenging. Analyzing data will help you to make the right decisions.

The representativeness provides an overview of who the most critical personas are and makes it easier to prioritize the to-dos. If a particular customer cluster, reflected in a persona, makes up for a large amount of your revenue, it would certainly make sense to improve their UX.

Data-driven UX Personas

As shown above, different persona components provide crucial information for the UX team. The clearer the understanding for whom the UX team is supposed to design for, the better the user-oriented outcome will be. Without having personas in place, the UX team is forced to speculate and follow a one-size-fits-all approach, which is never a good idea.

Using the personas as a source of information will allow you to meet your customer’s exact needs, whether it is interface behaviors, wireframes, or labeling, just to name a few.
Additionally, the UX personas will assist the executives and all stakeholders in assessing new product features, ideas, and strategies.

Download UX Persona Example

Download the full persona example used in the article.

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