What are UX Personas and Why are They Crucial for Product Designing

A user persona is a fictional character created to better understand consumer needs and requirements. Personas are an extremely advantageous tool if appropriately used; user personas are often neglected during the product development phase.   

Keep reading to learn more about User Personas and their role in UX.  

What is a UX Persona? 

I want you to imagine for a second here. Let us assume you are a beauty product seller, and a defined UX persona establishment will help you know your target audience's traits and qualities. In User Experience (UX), personas are crucial to developing a clear visualization of your target user(s).   

Personas area combination of text, icon/graphics, and personality traits; you can even give them a face(not in a weird way). For example, you can get a custom-drawn illustration or use an image and design it yourself.   

Remember that although user personas are fictional, they should be strictly based on facts and data related to real product users. You can research, read about how to do it properly, or use the traditional method of utilizing behavioral data (that you might have collected for your product design).   

Suppose you are an entrepreneur and new to product designing. In that case, you can educate yourself by reading blogs, asking experienced designers, or contacting a UI/UX design studio to get a consultation.   

Usually, a UX persona includes the below-mentioned qualities/traits;  

• The persona's name   
• An image to represent the persona (ex; it can be an illustration, avatar, or a stock image)   
• Demographic details such as your UX persona's age, gender, employment status, likes and dislikes as a person or else that are relevant to your product   
• The user's goals and life struggle   
•  A summary of their pain points concerning your product   
•  You can collect quotes from actual users whom the user persona should represent.  

You can assign different names to different UX personas segments if you wish to create more than one persona. Giving other names will help you throughout the process, plus naming user personas will make them more memorable. So, let us assume you create two UX personas, and both have different spending habits; you can call them respectively, one as" the Spender" and the other as "the saver."   

 What are Personas Used for in UX?   

You need empathy to connect with consumers. Being in someone else's shoes and understanding their scenarios is tough without compassion. When an organization or team of developers fails to develop empathy or connect with users organically- this is where UX personas come into the big picture.   

UX personas help build empathy among designers or developers and do not let the focus shift from "user" to "just designing." With the implication of UX personas, we keep it at the center of the entire design process.   

To come up with a usable UX persona, UX researchers and designers need to work together and capture the most crucial and valuable information they have about target audiences. In doing so, they are compelled to step into the user's perspective-and that's all you need to make your product lovable among wide users.   

UI/UX Den Pro Advise: Let alone the "creation process" of UX persona help you understand the user intensely.   

How do UX Personas help in the Designing Process?

Once you have developed a UX persona (or personas), you can get an understandable point of reference that you can turn to anytime in the designing process.   

Personas help you make' user-focused' decisions easily and shape the overall direction of the product creation. During the design process, make sure to ask yourself below mentioned questions; 

1. What would' Parrot' UX persona want in this situation?
2. What would help them outmost?  

Plus, at the same time your created user persona can help communicate with new designers or developers smoothly. One needs to glance at the UX user personas mentioned; they are ready to go!   

UX Personas, help you capture the essence of users, steer, inform and make design decisions.   

Different Types of Personas in UX 

There are three prime approaches you can indulge in while developing user personas;

• The quick method 
• The qualitative method, and
• The mixed method.   

Worry not; we'll explain all these personas.   

The Quick Method-Proto Personas

Pro to personas are generated swiftly and are based on pre-existing knowledge about the target audience. In this method, one does not do new user research. You can utilize any study or data you already have in store.   

These user personas are usually created within a work shop. They are used to capture people's assumptions about the target audience- but at the end of the day- these user personas are informed by rea data. Still, proto-user personas are beneficial when you are falling short of resources. 

The Quantitative Method-Qualitative Personas

Now, this is the real deal. This method is for you if you are a firm believer in doing everything from scratch. Qualitative personas are entirely based on qualitative research. This method is obviously a step from proto personas as they are concluded from accurate data. Qualitative personas are produced after small-scale research, you do not need unnecessary time and resource to create final personas.  

The Mixed Method

Also known as the Statistical method, this is the most thorough research method of all three. This method typically utilizes large data samples collected by real users.   

To conclude statistical personas, you will first need to do qualitative research on specific target commonalities and themes that repeatedly come up. You need to find the most common issues and look for solutions there. And from there, you can create a survey to collect more comprehensive user qualitative data. But this method is time-consuming, so it might not be the best option for small agencies.