3 perspectives of personas

A persona represents a potential user of a certain role, archetype or character that will use your service, point of sale or app.

Personas are indispensable to the success of a real or digital / virtual goods, tools or services because personas drive planning, managing and design decisions by taking users' needs and bringing them to the forefront of planning before the visual design or first development efforts have actually started. Personas provide each team member with a shared understanding of the upcomimg users in terms of goals and capabilities.

My main three perspectives of personas I see are …
  • Target and purpose of the persona
  • Empathy for the persona
  • Approach of the persona


Once you have a concrete user with her/his role, interest and influencing factors - you can define ...

  • the concrete targets and purposes (e.g. KPIs are no Goal - if you can not define the exact, concrete performacnce indicator)
  • the attitudes, motivations, and pain points, etc.
  • the approach and as well as the decision, steps to be made

Designing a great product always requires to 'walk a while in someone else's shoes' to feel, see and understand the user's needs, expectations and experience.

Personas are helpful throughout each phase of a real product or a virtual and digital product - from deciding on features to the sequences and the combination and interaction of features, content and context.
  • planing
  • task analysis (e.g. card sorting)
  • designing
  • prototyping
  • development
  • testing and evaluating (e.g selecting of Focus group  or  user journey walkthrough using personas)
Personas have been around since the ancient Greece and is used since then in architecture and urban planing, and was rediscovered for Marketing in the mid-1990s. Now they are an integral part of the user experience research phase of software development.

A persona was, is and will be always a crucial and essential part and tool of UCD (user centered design) and DT (design thinking) - when combined with additional user experience design methods, such as usability testing and task analyses, personas are vital to launching a useful and usable solution.

More About Personas:
http://ux4dotcom.blogspot.com/search?q=personas


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