Hi friend,
You’ve probably heard of designers talk about 'Personas'. It is a key element for most design processes across digital, physical, services, and even architectural design.
For those that have not heard, basically a persona is a fictional person that clarifies who is in your target audience. Personas are really good for strategizing and making smarter design-related decisions.
The actual selected persona isn't what's most important. The image you use to represent the persona isn't what's important. What's most important is the process of narrowing down and deciding, together, who specifically you want to create your new solution for. It's about getting alignment. And using this same persona throughout the rest of the design process when making design decisions.
This is something that you will have to remind other non-designers about, especially when there is a disagreement on what's best. As a designer myself, I was always interested in the process of creating this fictional person based on a combination of real insights. It constantly prevented me from projecting my own personal bias, opinions or suggestions and instead of thinking of the end user. It also stopped me (or any other designer) behaving as if they know it all and believing they know more about the target audience than the client or actual business owners/customer service reps themselves.
Don't get me wrong, there is a place for designers to create purely on their personal opinion / style and 'I know what's best approach' etc - however this usually falls under older more traditional processes or established celebrity designers who are paid for their artistic vision or designer kudos they can bring to a brand. But I would argue that in most business cases today, having a defined user persona that everyone else in the team can reference for decision-making is key. Especially when you're starting out a new endeavour.
When building your persona(s), consider questions like:
- Who are all the types of people that might be interested in what your building? (Create niches)
- How many of them are there? (Go for highly motivated, sufficiently large group)
- What’s the number #1 thing they would love/dislike about your solution?
- What makes them nervous / have objections? How can these be removed?
- What's the minimum your solution needs to deliver or do to be perceived as useful / valuable/better?
- How much momentum / demand is there for this type of solution right now from this type of persona?
A key tip when creating your persona is you should probably care a lot less about ensuring it is trendy/cool/sexy/stylish etc, and focus a lot more on identifying exactly what they need and want from the solution you’re creating.
|