YouX Academy

The Importance of Personas in Software Development

Luís Filipe

Managing Partner YouX

Miguel Félix

Managing Partner iBloom

In this article we will talk about an important method for working on usability in software development: Personas .

Personas: what are they?

personas are models that represent broad groups of potential users of an interface or application. Their goal is to create reliable and realistic representations of the user groups they are supposed to represent.

Although personas are fictional, they are specific and concrete representations of potential users that are built from studies that allow us to observe and capture the behavior and motivations of real people.

Personas: what are they for?

personas help to:

Define – help define what the application should be and how it will behave;
Communicate – they are a way of ensuring the central role of the user by allowing communication between all professionals involved in the software development project, constituting a common basis for discussion throughout the project.
Commit – as they are similar to real people and use a common language, they facilitate understanding user behaviors, generating consensus and commitment within the team.
Evaluate – personas can be used as an evaluation tool during the initial and intermediate phases of the software development process, contributing to efficient design.
Share – personas , due to their characteristics, are a good way to involve other departments beyond development. Marketing cases, or management and sales.
personas also have other design benefits by allowing you to avoid 3 major types of temptation:
- They help avoid the “elastic user” effect by crystallizing the characteristics of the potential user segments they represent.
- They avoid the temptation of a self-referential design, based on the preferences of those who are developing it.
- Avoid the temptation to create for extreme situations – cutting edge cases. With personas is easier to keep priorities defined for product features.

Personas: how are they constituted?

They are represented by individual people, personifications that can capture empathy from all the teams involved.
As they function as archetypes, they represent a segment of users of a given product.
personas can identify non-users (buyers for others, for example).
The sociodemographic data of the personas should mirror what was observed in the real world.
personas are not stereotypes, often skewed and unsupported in the real world.
More than demographic aspects, personas should incorporate the different behaviors displayed by users that can allow clusters of behaviors when multiple personasavailable.
personas must also be able to incorporate the motivations that drive consumer behaviors, expressed in goals.
The objectives must, in turn, allow identifying patterns of behavior and the reason that justifies them.
By incorporating all these features, personas should not be recycled for use in other products.

There are other concepts that have some similarities with personas: Role model / user roles, user profiles, market segments, proto-personas. Due to their usefulness, we highlight the proto-personas, in reality provisional personas since they are based on assumptions and hypotheses of the various people involved in the process and not on real data.

7 Steps to create a Persona

Identification of behavioral variables.
1. What users often do
2. Attitudes, what they think of the product or technology
3. Skills, training, learning capacity
4. Motivations, are interested in the product or technology
5. User capabilities related to the product or technological domain.
Match interviewees and behavioral variables.
1. Pay attention to discrete and continuous variables
Identify patterns of behavior.
1. Look for individuals who exhibit similar behaviors in 6 to 8 variables, which will represent a behavioral pattern
2. The constituted cluster must present a logical link or connection between the behaviors it encompasses.
Summarize the main characteristics and objectives.
1. Identify objectives related to the product/system
2. Include 1 life goal
3. Up to 2 objectives related to the user experience. iv) Include personasrelationships.
Check that we have all the information and eliminate redundancies.
1. Review and change and delete when necessary
2. Check if there are enough personas to describe potential users
Develop the characterization of attributes and behaviors.
1. Create a narrative in the third person that describes the persona, their attitudes, needs, problems, which can be complemented with photos.
Discriminate the persona.
1. It can be primary, secondary, supplementary, consumer, user or negative.

Depending on the amount of information collected and the nature of the product or system, we can present personas in various ways, such as using scenarios or storyboards.

Some methods used to create a Persona

personas must be supported by data collected mainly using ethnographic methods such as observation of the user in their environment, interviews and contextual inquiry. But there are other ways of obtaining information to support them: interviews with potential users outside the context of use, information obtained from experts, Focus groups and surveys, market segmentation models, data obtained through literature and previous studies, card sorting ,

YouX Academy

The Importance of Personas in Software Development

Luís Filipe

Miguel Félix

Personas: what are they?

Personas: what are they for?

Personas: how are they constituted?

7 Steps to create a Persona

Some methods used to create a Persona

RESEARCH | IDEATION

EXECUTION

MEMBER

RESEARCH
/IDEATION

EXECUTION

MEMBER

YouX Academy

The Importance of Personas in Software Development

Luís Filipe

Miguel Félix

Personas: what are they?

Personas: what are they for?

Personas: how are they constituted?

7 Steps to create a Persona

Some methods used to create a Persona

RESEARCH | IDEATION

EXECUTION

MEMBER

RESEARCH /IDEATION

EXECUTION

MEMBER

RESEARCH
/IDEATION