by By: Aaron De Ocampo
What is your persona?
In terms of creating personas you will need the following:
- research, analyze & survey
- data for personas
- demographics, behavior, lifestyle
- product use
- start constructing your personas
- name and define
- situation and attitude.
Check out this great article I found on UX Booth about creating personas by Eeva Llama. There are two points that stood out to me while reading her article. First, was her point stated “The persona is the voice of the user.” That point stood out to me and gave me a better understanding of personas. The second thing that stood out to me in her article was “Design for the primary – accommodate for the secondary.” It is important to create with your own style but it is important to remember that your client may have specific requests. Being creative but also prepared to make changes can benefit in the design process.
Creating personas is a helpful business strategy that helps you learn more about your audience. By understanding your personas it can help to build stronger relationships and connections. Building personas is like creating a Sim or my player on 2K. Ideally, it is who do you think your target audience? Are they college students? Are they millennials? When conducting research about your personas it is important to know more than just the basics. Find out common interests, characteristics, and desires. Arrange the people in a category to target their desires or their wants or even their interests. Think outside the box when deciding personas. It is pitfall when one overgeneralizes. Change is inevitable and events and people can influence each other to think and act differently. Personas have personality. Make sure to be personable when discussing personas. It is imperative that everyone on your team can be able to link an image to your persona. Like it was mentioned in class, the gamer persona is that many of them are older individuals who live with their parents. Good or bad, we categorize gamers with those characteristics and classify them all to be the same. That way when trying to reach and communicate with that specific audience it can be achievable with the right approach.
I found this short video posted by UX Mastery that breaks down how to perform basic user research, while turning your findings into personas to guide your design decision. Gregg Bernstein breaks down each step and has some great points worth noting.
Common fault: “We all think the customer acts and thinks likes us”
Twitter: @AaronDeOcampo
Aaron- great post! It was definitely cool to see different guest speakers talk about personas. The video you added at the end was a great touch to really putting it all together visually. The bullet points used in this blog post also made it a really easy read!
Great post, Aaron! The comparison to 2k or the Sims is a really great one for those who are just beginning their persona-creating journey. The thinking out the box is also so important to personas. I was the one who made the comment about the “typical” gamer persona and this issue can go beyond just gamers to many categories where people are overgeneralized, something you touched on really well.
Great post! The comparison to creating my player on 2k or building a sim is not what I would think of as a persona so that is very interesting. It is important to note that when building a persona to remember not everyone is like yourself, so I like how you pointed that out. Overall great post about personas and their importance to a brand.
I enjoyed this post, Aaron. It was nice to read a short piece about personas to tie together lecture that day. Developing personas can be tricky and it is important to think outside the box and see things through other people’s eyes.
Awesome post! Love to see you expanding on the personas we learned about in class. It’s so invigorating to see subjects I’ve learned about in classes (marketing) from my minor come into play in classes for my major (PR)! It’s so important for a brand to think outside the box in order to get an accurate look at their target consumers!
Great post! It is so important before a company develops its messaging to really sit down and figure out who their audience really is. Everything down from basic demographics to what they do on the weekends. All this information is imperative as it helps to distinguish the needs of the individual consumer and how your product or service can help them versus just taking a shot in the dark due to an overgeneralized image of a group of people you think are your consumers.
Really good post. It is important to be specific when creating your personas but not to be so specific you ostracize a large segment of your consumers.
Great read! It was very interesting in breaking down the idea of what personas are and how they are determined. I do think that many companies at times fall into the trap of creating too many personas. That they try to hard to be able to reach more people which take away from the actual need for that product. Overall great read and very informative.