Despite all the great aspects of Artificial Intelligence (AI) human perspective and guidance is required for UX Design, and most jobs. AI is unable to replicate creativity, emotional intelligence, morals, and common sense that humans practice each day. Empathizing with users can help UX designers create precise user persona’s that help shape the design and experience at a business.

User personas are fictional representations of users that a company hypothetically and actually has. Frances Carden, a writer at Digital.gov, defines hypothetic users as “proto-personas”. Carden states, “a proto-persona is effectively your assumptions about your audience or users – a way of collecting assumptions and hypotheses about what you think you know into a manageable outline for verification and further research”. Starting with a proto-persona can lead a UX Designer to focus on the goals that will be need to met through their journey on a website or application. This persona you create will not be a 100% accurate representation however the validated persona should be. It is important not to make either types of personas through stereotypes but instead by user research.

User Research

User research can be done in different ways but the most productive method is through interviews. Conducting interviews are best when in context to daily life because you can investigate the why behind a decision. Kevin O’Conner explains that in context analysis is more powerful in a proposal to stakeholders, interviews can be done through market research facilities and online.

In any method of user research a UX Designer must define a few things:

What is the users motivations to use your service?
What discourages a user from using your service?
What triggers a user to end up using your service?
Who influences your user to act and use your service?
How and where is your service being utilized by users?
What other personas are facing similar experiences to your user?
How do user persona’s behavior relate to one another?

Never depend on the personas you created to remain relevant as time goes on. Users are going to grow with the rest of the world, so their needs may also change.

Prepare for stakeholders

When you are ready to compile all your user research and notes you want to create comprehendible documents for stakeholders to learn from. For example, I have continued my analysis of Goodreads’ Website and application with two user personas: myself and a hypothetical 15 year old.

Each user persona should have an actual name and enticing photo that resembles the role they represent. In my Goodreads presentation it’s important to note that the 15 year old I’ve created does have a real name, photo, role, and description that helps stakeholders understand who their talking about. These components are important to include for the Influences and Persona family members that are being presented. A tip I’ll share is, use a image of a celebrity because of biases unintentionally carried by humans. Humanize the personas because our stakeholders are not robots they will relate more to a realistic person.

Read my Goodreads user personas below:

Goodreads Personas Download