Writing and creativity tie into some of the hobbies that I have - reading, listening to music, dancing, and drafting short stories. You’d think that as someone who enjoys creating characters and worlds in which these characters reside, I’d be a pro at creating user personas as part of the User Experience Design process. In reality, creating a user persona - assuming that the outcome will benefit me or my business in some way - is a challenging process but is a useful tool that helps designers identify who their customer base is, what is most important to these consumers, and what needs are/are not currently being met.
In his “A Guide to Personas,” Ben Ralph shares on the value of creating user personas as a way of a) getting into users’ heads in order to create a product that caters directly to them, and b) instilling a sense of empathy among those who create that product. As I shared in last week’s blog, empathy as a designer is important because it forces creators to think about what a well-designed product should look like -- and hopefully keeps said designers motivated and eager to make the lives of their products’ users easier. A a creator of products (a.k.a. marketing collateral) and a consumer of products, my initial instinct is to think that making money is the number-one objective of most companies. But to get the green, companies must ensure that the people paying them are happy. Ben Ralph says something that made me go back and read the sentence again: “[Creating personas] can be difficult to do: out of sight, out of mind. We are busy, we are in offices, we have deadlines, and our users are somewhere we are not...Your users don’t go away just because you decide not to look at them.” It sounds so simple but not every designer decides to take the necessary steps to get in the mindset of the customer. After all, time is money. With approximately 65% of user designers using customer personas as part of their UX research, according to Jeff Sauro, Ph.D. and author of Measuring U’s “7 Core Ideas About Personas and the User Experience,” it’s clear that many businesses do see the value in taking the time to connect to their target audience and their desires. In short, Sauro believes that creating a customer personas can answer questions that go beyond a simple market research interview, such as what aspects of a product a user found useful and when, how frequently that person uses the product, what his or her motivators are, and what drew the person to the product in the first place. The most recent example I can think of where I wish the company behind a product would’ve exercised more empathy for its users was when I was using the social media scheduling platform Hootsuite. One of my ‘side gigs’ is social media coordination for a local coffee roastery that my friend operates. While pre-scheduling some coffee posts for Instagram, I wanted to incorporate a multi-photo (or ‘carousel’ post). I also wanted to create images that weren’t square. Unfortunately, Hootsuite allowed me to do neither of these things. While carousel posts and non-square images can be posted directly through the Instagram app, Hootsuite doesn’t allow users to pre-schedule these types of posts. While going through Hootsuite’s FAQ forum to see how many other people had encountered this same problem, I hoped to find a solution but as it turned out, this had been an ongoing issue with Hootsuite for years that had not been addressed. I ended up abandoning Hootsuite altogether and signing up for a different (and better!) social media scheduling service. My point being, if Hootsuite’s designers had empathized with its users’ challenges and offered a solution instead of giving the canned response of “This has been an ongoing logistical problem that our developers are working on,” the company wouldn’t have lost me as a customer, and probably several others, too. I like the way this module’s Usability.gov article defines the process of creating user personas: “Personas help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation...Personas development belongs at the beginning of the project, as personas can inform site functionality, help uncover gaps, or highlight new opportunities.” Creating a user persona from the get-go might’ve helped make Hootsuite’s customers happier, perhaps not. But at the very least, finding the means to view one’s own product from a third-party perspective is a crucial component in creating a successful user experience.
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