I lost my designer or Why Persona is important
The story how I lost my designer and the full guide from me in simple words on how to create your personas
Table of Contents:
- Reasons we lost a designer
- Why personas are important?
- Guide how to make "persona"
Reasons we lost a designer
One day my amazing designer Tetiana decided to resign from our company. Losing team members is always a big challenge for a manager but Tetiana was also a good advisor regarding frontend development scenarios.
Reasons:
👉 stakeholders were changing priorities daily. The whole team was exhausted by that but for the designer is always a big pain when one part of the design is done, but it should be changed right away.
👉 no testing of new designs by real users before changing. So fast priorities and new tasks rush that designs were dying already in a test environment
👉 we forgot about personas. We skipped the big work that I did at the real start and were following only the top management strategy 🤦♂️
Why personas are important?
In product management, a persona refers to a fictional representation of a target user or customer that helps the product team better understand the needs, goals, behaviors, and motivations of their audience. Personas are created through research and analysis of user data, feedback, and demographics.
Personas help product teams:
- to understand and follow the needs of their target users
- to understand what functions will provide them with the best value
- to prioritize product features
- to make decisions about design and development
How to find out who is your persona? Guide
- Easiest - check the personas of your competitors.🕵️♀️ Who are their clients? How you can group them? What are their common traits?
- Think, who could use your service at all? Create a full list📝, we will be choosing from it.
- What are the goals of all these types of people in using your product? 🎯By goals you can also group them more.
- What is the behavior🕺💃 of each group that you divided by goal? Group them even more!
- Do the same with pain points and wishes.
In my experience, you will now have around 3-5 types of personas. Now make them visible!
📝👤Create the exact name, age, profession, goals, pains, and wishes, and describe them as a real story or card. You are creating a fairytale now which will help your product to stand out!
Example: Tony 🧔, 45 y.o 🗓️, is still in very good shape 💪. He is an army veteran and still wants to be in shape. He is afraid to lose body control and look too old. Even though he is proud of being a veteran, the word "retired" is offending him. He wants to feel strong and appreciated. He wants a gym app so he will be able to get help with exercises without anyone knowing that he is getting help. (remember, I just made it out of fantasy and it may be not your case)
In my case, my stakeholder is always saying that he is our first user, so he is our persona but it is not right. One person can't represent the whole persona. I would vote for more real users testing.
