Mia Krysa

When designing a new item, product, or service, it’s helpful to know who you’re designing for. Not only must you empathize with your target audience, but you should also know their demographics, hobbies, who they’re influenced by, and what their day-to-day looks like. These details are crucial because they keep the important part of design (humans!) at the forefront of the conversation. Now, picture this information neatly wrapped in a little box with a bow. These little boxes are called personas.

Here’s the fancy definition of personas according to UX Magazine:

A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like. Behaviors, attitudes, and motivations are common to a “type” regardless of age, gender, education, and other typical demographics. In fact, personas vastly span demographics.

Companies use personas to help them design for groups of people, rather than make a product for one person with one individual problem. Personas are either made up, or created based on patterns found after conducting research. There’s no “right or wrong” when it comes to personas, and there are a few different versions of them.

1. Goal-directed personas. These kinds of personas are developed to focus on one thing: what does the user want to achieve with my product? What are some issues that the user might run into? How do we move through these issues? Basically, how can they achieve the goal we want them to achieve, with our product or service?
2. Role-based personas. Role-based personas are a perfect mix of goal-directed personas and human behavior. They include lots of data and focus on the user’s role in the process.
3. Engaging personas. Engaging personas take into consideration the emotions of the user, as well as their psychology and behavior. Designers use engaging personas to make them seem more “real” to inspire more ideas.
4. Fictional personas. Fictional personas are exactly how they sound – fictional. They come from experience, assumptions, and sometimes stereotypes of the people creating them. Many argue that these personas can be flawed because they’re not based on data. Although this may be true, I think fictional personas are the most fun to create and work with.

This week, after creating a few personas based on my A&F website analysis, I realized how much more difficult I found it to create one around myself, rather than make one up. It took me a while to pinpoint what I thought was worth including and what might be better left out. For some reason, this was probably the most difficult exercise for me in the graduate program thus far, and I’m not exactly sure why. While I appreciate the use of personas, I do know that there are designers who feel that they’re sometimes unnecessary.

Whatever your opinion is on personas, I believe that they’re useful to get your creative juices flowing. Next time you’re engaged in the design thinking process, give them a try.

And, if you’d like to take a look at my personas I created for A&F, they’re embedded below.