Complete guide on User Personas

1. What's this course all about?: Hi, and welcome to the course on surface design persona's. My name is tipo de Bois and I'll be your instructor throughout the remainder of the course. Now, before you commit, you might want to know what my credentials are, which is totally understandable. I am a manager in one of the largest consulting companies in the world and an active as a business, as a consultant in business analysis and service design. I have been applying services, sign in many high-profile projects, especially in the financial sector. I helped banks in designing and implementing complete new offerings for their customers using a service design mindset and service design techniques, which I would love to share with you during this course. In terms of Academical records, I hold two master's degrees, one in financial economics, and another one in general business management. On top of that, I also holds many certifications related to service design, such as design thinking, business analysis, story mapping, Agile Scrum, and data analytics. This out of the way, you might want to know what's in it for you. After you have completed this course, you will acquire everything there is to know about service design. Persona's. These type of persona's are very powerful within service design. They help us to accurately the tailored the user experience to the needs of the target user base. During this course, we will go over the service assigned persona's benefits, building blocks, their characteristics, how to create and deploy them. And we will finish it all off with a real-world use case. You'll also have access to the handouts, templates, and my expertise in case you have questions about the course. Please note that this course is part of a larger series. We also cover other courses on service design where we tackled topics like services, AI fundamentals and patterns, prototypes, customer journey maps, service design, blueprints, etc. You should definitely check those out if you like the content of this course. The link should be in the description and who is this course for? It's basically for anybody looking to start a position as a service designer or a business analyst, business consultant to product manager or product owner or even a UX designer. Experienced professionals that are looking to strengthen their knowledge are also more than welcome to. But that's enough from me. Now it's your turn to act. If you feel that this course is something for you, then please hop on board. And if not, maybe next time. In any case, I wish you a wonderful and educational day and I hope to see you soon. Bye. 2. Introduction to service personas: Hi, and welcome to this lecture on service design persona's. First, let me start off with explaining what a persona is. Personas are fictional characters that a designer creates with qualitative and quantitative data. Their aim is to represent the different user that might use a company's service, product side or brand in a similar way. Persona's, we'll often represent customers, but they can also cover other groups, such as employees, internal users, technology suppliers, government officials, etc. It's important to understand that a surface design persona is based on actual research and it's not a representation of a stereotype. Personas are also different from your typical marketing segments, which are often based on only demographics. A persona goes further than that. They are fictional characters that express the needs, the wants, and the behavioral patterns of a company's customers. In order to master persona's, we will go over the following topics. The pursuant of building blocks, the four types of persona's to create a persona in six easy steps. And also check out a case in point for my professional experience and finishing off with some key takeaways. Before we dive into these lectures, that is first P critical and ask ourselves, why is there a need for a persona in the first place? The first reason is that it helps serve as the scientists to get a better understanding of the customer needs, behaviors, and goals. This is needed in order to solve customer pains in a consistent and targeted manner. Next, it helps serve as designers to build empathy with their target groups. Empathy will enable us to make design decisions that are in the interests of our users. And some companies persona's have been embedded so much that all employees know what exactly, exactly who the customer is by simply hearing the name of the persona. It also makes the design task less complex as persona's guides the ideation process and it helps to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience in general. For instance, I've often used persona's during brainstorming sessions to guide participants into coming up with ideas that are in line with the persona's characteristics. Another reason is that service designers can engage with persona's to test and challenge their assumptions. It helps them to ask the right questions and answer those questions in line with the target users. For example, would John, Mark, and Dan can experience, react and behave in relation to feature x or change why within the given context? And what do John, Mark, and Duncan think, feel, do and say, and what are the underlying needs that we are trying to fulfill? Doing this makes discussions a lot more tangible, don't you think? And finally, persona's are a way to make our research results more actionable by making them personal. Instead of just showing demographic data, we will take that data and apply to our persona's. This will make it easier to share the data to the rest of the design team and the organization as a whole. Let's now go over the different building blocks of what constitutes a persona. See you in the next lecture. Bye. 3. Persona building blocks: Hi and welcome back. In this lecture, we will go over the different building blocks that you should include in your persona. First, it's important to add a face to your persona. A portrait image of a random person is sufficient, but please keep in mind the following aspects. Try not to use images of celebrities to avoid any prejudice. Also for obvious reasons, avoid to use images from inappropriate people like criminals, for instance. Moreover, if you want to use an image of yourself or one of your colleagues, please keep in mind that this persona will be used for a long time and will be potentially be spread throughout the rest of the company. If you or your colleagues are fine with that, please go ahead. This is more optional, but you can also use additional imagery to better set the context. It helps to sketch the environment of the persona and reinforcers behavioral patterns, goals, and motivations. An example can be an image of where the persona spends a lot of his or her time, such as at work or at home. Another possibility is to add images of the objects at the persona hold steer. This again helps to create more empathy around a persona. Also avoid stereotypical assumptions by choosing gender, age, and ethnicity. Ethnicity neutral portraits, unless this is your target group, of course, next to her face, you should also think of a name for your persona. Again, try to use a name that's as neutral as possible and that reflects the social environment of your customers. Also try not to use names from celebrities again to afford prejudices. In addition, it's good to add a small quote that summarizes your persona's character. This will speed up the empathy buildup of the design team and it's also easier to remember. Okay, we now have a face and a name. Next we need to add some demographics and other basic information. This includes things such as gender, age, location, etc. First, a small word of caution. This type of information is often seen as being quite important in marketing environments. However, from a surface design perspective, disinformation is of secondary importance because it's hard to drive to sign decisions based on that information alone. It has been proven that demographics are nuts, a good predictor of needs and behaviors. To give you an example, we tend to assume that elderly people are on average less good with technology. But having done a lot of user research, I often found this statement to be untrue. Elderly people have, in general more time on their hands and like to remain up-to-date with technology so that they can keep communicating with their grandchildren. For instance, it's more the working adults with full-time jobs and children that tend to be left behind as they have less time to immerse themselves in new technologies. Use demographics with care and with unnecessary disclaimers. To make this part more relevant, you should consider adding insights captured during qualitative and quantitative research on your target group. And try to visualize these statistics in a format that can be easily understood by the design team and by the rest of the organization. Finally, the most important part of the services and persona is the detailed information. This is the real core of your persona. Here you should include any information which is relevant to your design exercise, such as characteristics, personality, attitudes, interests, skills, needs, expectations, motivations, goals, frustrations, preferences, background stories, etc, etc. The difficulty with this component lies in knowing when a description is sufficiently clear. You can really go overboard with this exercise. But personally, I would only include inflammation of this directly impacting the company's core offering. To give you an example, knowing what type of perfume the customer prefers might not be very relevant given that the company's core business is about invoicing software. This is a gentleman called on the surface designers side. That's it for the persona's building blocks. Later in the lecture on casing point, I will show you how I actually worked out a certain persona for a, for a consumer bank. They were interested in developing their offering towards their younger clients segments. But more on that later. In the next lecture, we will go over four different types of persona's that you might encounter. See you there. Bye. 4. Share your thoughts!: Hi, TiVo here. Sorry for the small interruption. I just wanted to let you know that if you're liking the course up to here, that you can already leave a review. Read use are extremely helpful to me as they let me know what is already good and what I should be improving. And it's also very helpful to your fellow students as they know if this course is worth following. Well, that's it for me. I wish you a nice educational day. Bye. 5. Persona types: Hi, and welcome back. In this lecture, we'll cover four types of persona's that are often used in their surface design environment. Let's take a look at each one of them. Basically, you have persona's that are goal-oriented, role-based, engaging, or fictional. Each persona type has the distinct, distinctive characteristic which will give you and your design team that extra edge when defining persona's. Let's start with the goal-oriented persona. This persona could straight to the nitty-gritty. It focuses on what this might typical user wants to do with Mike product. The objective of this persona is to examine the process and workflow that you're that you're pursuing. I would prefer to utilize in order to achieve their objectives. Within this type of persona, you need to include three elements. The first element is that you have the persona itself, where you describe what the story's about, attitudes and motivations to goals and the pain points. The second element is that there is the scenario. This element defines when, where, and how the story of the persona takes place. The scenario is in fact, the narrative that describes how the persona behaves as a sequence of events. And third is the persona's goals. This element defines what the persona wants or needs to fulfill. The goal is the motivation of five persona is taking action, the scenario, and when the goal is reached. Now, that was the goal oriented persona. Let's now move on to the role-based persona. The defining characteristic of this type of persona is that is extremely data-driven. This type is more used for persona's that will represent internal users instead of external ones. Basically, your starting point to create such a persona is a rule that the persona place inside the organization. Think of a digital marketer, for instance, having a good understanding of the digital market tiers role will help us to make more informed design decisions. The elements that you should include are the purpose of the persona rule. So a role can be a profession like a digital marketer, for instance. Next, you should also provide a description of how the products we are designing could help your persona in their current role. Then there is a description of the professional objectives linked to that role. Our digital marketing, you will probably want to generate leads and send them to sales, for instance. And then lastly, you should map all the other rules that are impacted by the role of your persona. Like I mentioned, sales would probably be impacted by our digital marketeer, but communication probably as well as they will need to prepare commercial material. So that sums up the role-based persona. Let's now move to the engaging persona. This is personally my go-to persona, and it's because it's the most complete. This type of persona aims to increase the engagement of the design team as much as possible. This in turn will push them to design an experience that better serve the persona. We tried to create a persona that's as close as possible to a real customer. We do this by examining the emotions of the user depth psychology backgrounds, and make them relevant tasks at hand. It can incorporate both goal and rope directed persona's. It also forces the designers to move away from seeing the customer as a stereotype which is hard to identify with. And finally, it provides a more realistic version of the persona by creating a realistic description in the form of a rounded character with a believable backstory. You can even go as far as creating a 2D or 3D model of your persona. So we have now arrived at the fourth and final type of persona named the fictional persona. Fictional persona does not emerge from any user research unlike the other persona's. It instead emerges from the experience of the UX design team. It requires the team to make assumptions based upon past interactions with the user base and products to deliver a picture of what a typical user could look like. These persona's will likely be deeply flawed, but can serve as an initial sketch of user needs. They allow for early involvement with your users in the UX design process. But it should not be trusted as a guide for your development of products or services later on. And there you have it. These are the main persona types to you to pick the right one. As I mentioned, I prefer to use the role-based persona, but that's just a preference. In the next lecture, we will go over the six steps to create your own persona. See you there. Bye. 6. Persona creation: Hi, and welcome to this lecture on how to create a persona in six easy steps. I see you thinking six steps. Isn't that a bit much for creating a persona? Well, you're right if it's just about creating it. But there is more than that. You also need all the impacted stakeholders to be aware of the persona and adopt it. If this doesn't happen, your risk people losing focus, and to start assigning things that are not in line with what the user, what the users actually want. So in those six steps, there is a creation part and the communication part. Let's go over them. Step one is about data collection. You collect as much knowledge about the users as possible. This can be done through user tests, interviews, surveys, historical data analysis, desk research, customer reviews, observations, et cetera. Step two is about establishing a sensible number of persona's. It's good to have multiple persona's per product. But you should have a main persona to not lose focus. If you try to design a solution that works for all persona's, then chances are high that none of them will be happy. So guaranteeing an excellent user experience for your main persona is more important than creating an average user experience for all persona's. In step three, you will be creating the actual persona. For this step, I would just advise you to simply use the building blocks as a reference and to also choose a type of persona. Step four, after your persona's have been created, it's time to validate them with the design team and the rest of the organization. You can't forget about your stakeholders involved the project participants as much as needed. I always ask as many team members as possible to participate in the development of the persona's. This creates buy-in from the get-go and it builds empathy for the whole team. Step five, after persona has been validated, it's time for you to further promote your persona within the organization. People often forget this step. But a persona is only useful when the whole organization works towards creating a better user experience for that persona. It's also important to define how stakeholders will get access to your persona and its underlying data. Communicating your persona tool, the organization's management, and having it published on the internet can be a good start. And then the final step, you need to keep your persona alive and up-to-date. It's important that you revise the description and statistics with each new relevant piece of information that you uncover from your customers. Also do a check whether a certain persona's should be eliminated or not. They might not be, they might not be relevant anymore due to changing aspects from the products or the markets. And viola, those were the six steps to create your persona. In the next lecture, I will go over a practical use case of a persona that I created for a client's small tip, you should pay close attention as you will need to do it as well for your own projects. Hope to see you there. Bye. 7. Persona case in point: Hi, and welcome to this lecture on case and points. In this lecture I will go over a practical use case of a persona that I created for the clients to set the context. A rather small bank in Belgium wanted to rebrand itself for, for the younger retail segments, the bank was experiencing a high churn rate because more and more of their older customers passed away. And this left the bank. In order to counter this trend, the bank wanted to bring in younger customers, but quickly noticed that they were a little out of touch with this new window. With this new generation, the needs and behaviors of those younger segments were completely different compared to the older ones that they were used to serve. This is why the bank wants us to create a persona for that younger segment. It was to better understand their needs and wants. You have to know that customers in the young retail segments are quite fickle compared to older segments. These younger customers want to, want instant gratification, are not very loyal, have very high digital expectations. They also just want to understand the essential and essentials and prefer not to be bothered with the boring details. So not an easy segment to please, but don't necessarily want, if you want to still have a customer base as a bank. So how did we tackle this? Well, we use the six steps to plan our analysis and then we got to work. As a small reminder, the six steps were data collection, establishing the number of persona's pursuant to creation, the persona validation, the persona promotion, and the persona maintenance. Step one, data collection. First of all, we decided to limit the scope of our data collection to key H generations. We only looked at millennials, generation Z, Generation Alpha. So Millennials are people that are born between 19811996. Generation Z are people that are born between 19972012 and Generation Alpha are born after 2012. The bank was only interested in customers that had the ability to generate capital for themselves. So generation Alpha was removed from our scope as they would probably rely on their parents for money. Leaves us with two generation, the millennials and Generation Z. Within Generation Z, we made an extra segmentation of minors and non minors. We decided to only consider non minors as they have full ownership on their financial assets. Note that it's possible to also create a strategy for minus, but this was out of the scope for the banks needs. Now that the scope is defined to these two segments, we basically used three different sources of inflammation. We used a combination of desk research, qualitative research, and quantitative research. We started with desk research on each generation to get a better idea of what we're dealing with. This means reading reports, surveys, specialized sources, and most importantly, declined database. If the financial institution, you have to note that databases are like digitized gold for banks, they can target the customers, but extreme precision and at the exact right moment, this helped us to map the demographics of our persona's. But we were also able to identify certain spending patterns and other behaviors such as moments of truth. Did you know that one of the most important moments of truth for a customer when they choose their bank is the moment they want to buy a house. This is because of the mortgage. A moment of truth is very important for a bank as it's, as it's when they'll be able to acquire or lose a customer for many years to come. But I digress. After that, we went with a qualitative research where we did an in-depth interview with clients from each generation to get a better understanding of their needs and who they were. This was the most valuable source of information to build the image of the persona and the description, you really get a sense of who your customers are doing these types of interviews. And we then finished with some quantitative research to answer questions around broader patterns that we discovered in previous interviews. We ask the bank to conduct one large-scale survey to better understand the spending behaviors of those two generations. We noticed that millennials have a better sense of saving and are more loyal compared to their generation Z counterparts. Both whoever wants instant gratification won't hesitate to jump ship if the customer experience is low below their expectations. This concluded the data collection part. In step two, it was time to define the number of persona's. In order to keep it simple, we propose to create one persona per generation. This would also help us later in the promotion of the persona as stakeholders can easily keep both in mind and attached them to a generational concept, which is something very tangible and present in a day-to-day environment. Now, it was time to start creating a persona. For sake of simplicity, I will only show you the Generation Z persona that we created. I present to you Emily. First step, we have to define the imagery and domain. We have decided to go with a young person to indicate a generational aspect. We first chose to name Elsa, but we felt this is already too much of a reference to the frozen movies. So we changed it to Emily to make sure we kept a neutral profile for her. Just look at the most common names for boys and girls. And you have yourself and name. Basic information. What do we have in our basic information? Emily is a 20 year old female who currently lives in Brussels. She's a second year student and likes to take things as they come one step at a time. This quote indicates that she is not too worried about life as she just really started her journey as an independent adults. She also has a student job, which gives her a small revenue and puts her in the retail segment. This segment incorporates all customers that have a certain amount of capital which is kept at, let's say, a 100 K. This segment often holds the bulk of customers for most commercial banks. With this information, you already have a very basic image of who the customer is. But we need more if you want to create an offering that fits their needs. Let's now move on to the more detailed information. First step, time allocation. Emily's typical day includes studying, spending time with her friends and family, doing sport, hobbies like drawing and visiting museums and little bit of investing. As you can see, Emily doesn't have a lot of time to focus on investing, which is understandable or giving her given her lifestyle. This is something we have to take into account in our offering later. Needs and goals. Emily was able to save up some money thanks to her student job in the grocery store. She heard that one of her friends has been investing and earned some pocket money and onside without having to do anything. Emily got interested and would also want something similar, money, just earning money without having to do anything. This sound quite nice to her motivation and interests. Regarding Emily's motivation and interests, we wrote down the following. She is quite focused on her studies in arts, and she likes to visit museums to get some inspiration for how drawings. It's also quite handy as she's able to pick up things related to our studies. Emily also really likes to spend time with her friends and family, sitting together with them at a telescope with a cocktail or a beer. It's fun of her favorite activities. She also likes to do paddle paddle with them, which is handy as it helps her to stay in shape. Moving onto her frustrations, Emily doesn't like to go to the branch to fill in investment related documents. Why can't it be done digitally? She's thinking she doesn't want to spend time knowing what the differences between a stock and the bond count my money just be invested in something that brings some value later on. So you notice from her frustrations that she's not really patient and just wants that instant gratification. Not easy for a bank that is used to serving older generations that like to figure out every little detail. We also added two specific components that are less common In persona analysis. These are attitude towards the bank and technology savviness. You believe these components will be key into developing a compelling offering for these two persona's. So what's Emily's attitude towards the bank in general? Emily holds no particular loyalty towards her bank, is just the same bank that her parents have for all the time. And so she never bothered to look for another one. Emily only interacts with the bank to make payments and receive for student job salary on. It's important that they have a nice and smooth working application. Actually never uses the desktop application. She's always out with her friends. Remember? Technology savviness? Emily is not a gadget freak or an early adopter, but she will look into features that her friends have been recommending to her. Emily doesn't want to figure out all the details, just the essential features that matter. Voila, we now have created a persona for our generation Z customer, which can be used for a great number of things. Please note that this is just an example or a proxy of that customer base. It's not a marketing segment that you can target with campaigns, but it gives an image about the customer that we are designing a solution for. It helps us to direct our decision-making when designing and fast dashboard for younger sicker segment, for instance, would you add a great deal of dashboarding functionality is like sorting, filtering, grouping, or keep the dashboard rather light with just the essential features. Taking a look at them, the second option sounds more like the thing she would, she would prefer. Next, it's important to validate a persona with our stakeholders and to promote it within the organization. Depending on the company, the validation typically is done in steering committee. If you receive a girl from them, It's time to also promote it to the relevant stakeholders to ensure that everyone is working towards solving the needs of the same persona. This is very important as it creates a customer oriented focus throughout the rest of the company, which will positively impact the user experience at all layers. Once that's done, you need to maintain your persona by regularly reviewing the basic and detailed information in the context of this case. In a couple of years, the millennial generation one probably be considered as being a young generation anymore. So it will need to make room for the new alpha generation, which probably has its own needs and wants. So there you have it. The bank is now able to create offerings that fit the needs and wants of this persona. And now it's your turn to make one. I have a rubber fence assignment for you. I want you to create a persona of someone that you are familiar with. This can be yourself, a family member or even a friend. But don't go too much into detail as your persona is supposed to be a representation of a group of customers with distinct features. Don't hesitate to go back to the building blocks and the steps to create your persona. If possible, try to validate a persona with other people that you know and see if they agree with the results. If you're stuck, don't hesitate to message me and we'll definitely find a way to move forward. So that's it for me. I wish you the best of luck with the assignment. Bye. 8. Persona key takeaways: Hi, and congratulations for finishing the section on persona creation. I hope that you had some fun during the assignments. Let's quickly go over some of the key takeaways. Shall we? Persona's help serve as designers get a better understanding of the customer's needs, behaviors, and goals. A persona has a multiple, has multiple building blocks that you definitely need to include in your analysis. These include imagery and name, some basic information like demographics, and then some detailed information on motivations, frustrations, interests, etc. Remember that there are four types of persona's, which are goal-oriented, role-based, engaging, fictional. And the last key takeaway is that you can create a persona using six easy steps. Data collection, establishing the number of persona's persona creation, validation, promotion, and maintenance, and roller. This concludes this section on persona's. I hope that you now have a good understanding of what a persona is, why it is needed, and how it is created. I wish you a wonderful and educational day. Bye. 9. Wrapping up: Congratulations on finishing the course. You can tap yourself on the back. You deserve it. Before leaving you, I just wanted to give you one more important key takeaway. I mentioned it before, but please remember that serve as the sign isn't just a tool, It's a mindset. So I do know that we have spent quite some time on the tools, but they are only as effective as the person handling them. As a service designer, you have to put the customer at the center of everything you do. Be pragmatic, focused on co-creation, be very hands-on, and find a balance between technical feasibility, customer needs, and business opportunities. If you keep these things in mind, art, you'll see that the tools you're using will work wonders. I can assure you that much. I still have one more bonus takeaway for you, which is to relax and do something fun. Indeed, it's no time to give your brain a break and let it process everything that you've just learned. This will solidify your knowledge and make it stick longer. If you like the course, don't forget to leave a review. And if you want to see more content coming from me, I have a course on requirements elicitation that's definitely worth checking out. Okay, that's all from me. I wish you a wonderful and educational day. Bye. 10. Share your thoughts!: Hi TiVo here. Congratulations for finishing the course. I hope you got something out of it and it will be helpful in your future career. In case you'd like to course, please leave a review and let others know what you liked about it. That seems extremely helpful to me and it's also helpful for other students. Now, if I go have a nice and educational day, Bye.