How to Create Simple User Personas (Ep. 1)

How you design better websites, reports, presentations, toolkits, and all sorts of other things, really does start with the audience. But what does actually mean? In this vlog I’ll talk you through creating super simple user personas that can help you design better information products.

Transcript

All right. So in the research and evaluation world, there are tons and tons of websites and tool kits and reports and videos and presentations.

Now, if you were to ask the people who designed this stuff, if they thought about the audience while they were designing this stuff. The answer is yes, of course we did. I mean, we have teachers, we’re trying to reach politicians. We have some managers. It would just go on like that. They would just have like this laundry list. It could be just like a long bullet point list.

Of all the different people that they created, a report or video or website, whatever to help serve. The problem. It’s not really all that useful. Like when you think of a big group of an audience like that, it doesn’t really help you design. Because ultimately. Design is really about people and their experience.

So, yeah, I’m a user experience designer human centered designer. So of course. It’s always about people. It’s always about the user experience. But. Even just in general. If you can see your products, the things that you’re creating through the eyes of the person you’re serving. And you can get really specific about the person. You can understand how to start making it better.

Now, if we really want to start getting into this person’s head. One method that we can use is the user persona method. Now it doesn’t have to be really complicated or complex. You can find all sorts of things. If you hit up Google and ask about user personas or avatars or these kinds of things. Well, we can make it really simple.

So I like to call these simple user personas. Because, well, that makes sense. All right. Here we go. Here’s one. This is the overworked. Project manager. And on this card, I just have a little picture of a person. This is my overworked project manager. And it a little thing that they’re telling me, like if I were to talk to them.

And say, okay. Tell me about what you need. And they’re like, well, I’ve got 10 things on my plate. So tell me what I need to know. All right now, let’s go with another one. Here we go. This is the big boss. Now the big boss is telling me I’m interested, but super busy. So just give me the highlights.

Now the thing about these two people is they’re two different people. They have very similar needs, they want something short, like an executive summary presentation side doc, something like that. But, just seeing them as two different people can help you start thinking through your design a little bit.

Because they’re different. So if you can put like a real person behind it, it helps even more. The idea is that if you start creating these kinds of things, and then you go into a discussion with your team about how to make a report better, or a website better. You can pull out one of your little avatars and go.

Well, what would this person. Our overworked project manager. Think about this thing that we created. And you can see it creates a different conversation. And then if you were just to talk about the design without talking about the person. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to better inform our designs by including people in them.

And user personas, even simple user personas, scribbled on a note card. Can do a lot to help with that. Alright, until next time. Talk to you later.