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.