Persona and how to identify them

What is a persona? I probably won’t go into detail about the definition of Persona, I think a lot of articles have covered that matter already. Persona in software development is, as the word calls it, a representation of people. But not just any people, in software development, persona represents a majority of user for your soon-to-be published application.

Why do we need personas?

Persona is a guide that you will be using throughout your software development process. It acts as a key to better understand your user’s personal needs, experiences, and goals. With personas, you will have a clear and narrowed goal about what your software is going to be like or how your software is going to interact.

Okay I got the gist of it, but it doesn’t seem hard to identify one, right?

Actually, it does. Because we use persona as a key reference for our software development process, every choice we make regarding the development of our software will be highly based on how we define our persona. A good persona will easily guide you to make a software satisfied by many while a bad persona will somehow contradicts your software from real life users. Of course, a good persona will express the hard research put behind it.

So how do I identify a persona then?

1. Conducting a research. The very first thing we would want to do when identifying a persona is conducting a research. Gather data and knowledge about our real life target user group. This can be done by using all kinds of research method such as interviewing or even survey.
2. Goals, behaviors, and frustrations. When conducting a research, the data we’re gathering should mainly be about their goals and frustrations when using our software services. Of course, we also have to ask about backgrounds, this will be helpful when categorizing our data into personas.
3. Make assumptions. After conducting a research and gathering data needed to make personas, We will need our take on what can be generalized and categorized about the data itself. Can the data be separated into different blocks or types? This form of categorization will be a rough persona of our software.
4. Refine the personas. Describe our persona in a way that is realistic. Give each of our personas fictional names, jobs, demographics, pictures, goals and frustrations, quotes that describe what they are looking for in our software, so on and so forth. Remember, this should not be based on real life sensitive information of our research subjects.
5. Lastly, prioritize the personas. After creating personas for our software, we need to prioritize ourself to one persona our software should be focusing on. you probably wonder, why bother making more than one persona if in the end we only prioritize on one? This is because the goal of personas is not so that we can provide services that addresses all needs but instead only the major things needed from the most important persona while still providing some needs for other personas.

This is all very confusing!

Don’t fret! Here’s an example of a persona my agile development team created :

And yes, our product owner probably uses a stock photo for the profile picture.

In theory, creating a persona may look like a chore, a hard one at that. But personally, I find it very fun and helpful for my software development process. Though it seems hard to master, in time, as you create personas for different kinds of software, you will adjust (I’m still adjusting myself). Last thing to note is, you won’t know until you try!