Persona is the key
Building the personas is the best way to design the application before starting
Some of you maybe don’t know what a persona is. A persona is a fictional character that represents the user of you application in a specific way. The persona targets the real-world user of our application. It will help us design the needs of our users and also tackle problems easier since we know how our users think.
Persona is based on data, not just a fictional data that we made up and find the similarities among them. We collect the data from an activity called User Interview. In user interview, we are interviewing some of the people that is the market target of our application.
Elements of persona
In creating a persona, there are elements that are mandatory to be filled. Those elements are what make persona a very useful tool in the UX field.
Photo
The photo of our persona plays a significant role in identifying the target audience of our application. It will help us in creating a mock identity that is easy to remember and recognizable. The photo also plays a role in determining how the design would look based on a their looks. For example. The photo of a persona is an old man; then we should design the application so that it would be comfortable to be used by them.
Name
A persona must be named so that it could be differentiated from the other personas. Again, this will help us in recognizing which persona that we are talking about when designing.
Description
This part is very important; it explains the way the users think and also what they are planning to do. The description of the persona should be in a form of summary of the fictional person. It should contain some goals and desired outcomes that the user would expect after using our application.
Problems
Users are going to be using our application if it solves the problems that they are having. It is very to crucial to be realistic about these problems since we are targeting the real-world audience. It help us in revising the goal of our application and also address problems that varies around the users.
Persona in Clicks
For introduction, Clicks is a platform where business owners can promote their business; regardless of size, to the community. It also allows them to connect and possibly partner up with other business owners. It is a very useful application if you are going to promote your small business to the world.
After discussing with the product owner, we have concluded that there will be two personas. The first persona is a brand new business owner who is looking for fresh food material for her food business. The second persona is a fresh food business owner that are promoting his fresh food business so that he could get customers.
After we have defined the personas for our application, we decided several thing for the app:
- Since this is a platform that allows business owners to get connected to one and another, then the registration phase should not be complicated, they should contain their contacts; phone or email, at least. This is crucial because we want to connect as many business owners as possible with each other; or even an investor.
- The UI for the application should be as simple as possible. Business owners only need sufficient interface to enable them to do their job; as long as they are clean, then it is already good to go.
- Considering that there maybe several people that are already old, we have to make the flow as simple as possible. Older generation thinks differently than the earlier, they are more likely to be confused a lot more.
Final words
Persona is a very powerful tool in the UX realm and it is considered as a one of the fundamental component of a project. It could help us decide how is the application going to operate. In Clicks, it has helped us tremendously since we design our application based on the users’ needs that we have defined in the personas in the first phase of our design.
