Personas help to determine how to design a workflow, characterizing what a user needs to accomplish his or her goals. Understanding the context of use, motivation and task frequency are only a few key components of a useful persona. These assist in providing focus and clarity in our design thinking. While a persona is not a real person, they are built upon, and are largely based on, observations of target users.
When creating a persona, one should include information about the user, their goals, pain points, wants, needs, recommendations and so forth.
Take a female, third-grade elementary school student, for example, who attends class daily, with minimal absences. She studies very hard, yet does not receive the markings expected of a responsible student. Based on this and other information, she has been identified as having a learning disability and accommodations have been made. This student receives additional resource room assistance, in addition to tutoring and sees her grades improve. She strives for excellence and, with the right accommodations, is beginning to realize them. Her goal is to perform at the level of her peers and to improve her academic confidence. She is beginning to use assistive technology and is seeing a benefit. Due to her age, she needs an intuitive platform that is accurate and comfortable to use on a daily basis.
While personas, like I said are not a real person, they are based on observations of target users. The above example, is a target user I have observed — my daughter. Seeing software developed with a persona similar to her in mind, one that will help her continue down the path of academic excellence on her own two feet, is encouraging. Knowing that there are UX designers out there, thinking about accessibility in the forefront of their minds, is very reassuring as a parent.
So from this class, in our last official journaling reflection, I reflect upon this: We may aim to fail frequently and fast in user experience design, this, however, is a good thing. We are iterating our designs and continuously moving in a direction that will not only help our products succeed, but also those who use them.
“If you are a designer, help fight the battle for usability. If you are a user, then join your voice with those who cry for usable products.”
— Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things