Transcripts
1. Course Introduction: Welcome to this course where I'll teach you how you can make use of personas into
your design process. My name is faisal, and I'll be your instructor
for this course. I'm an entrepreneur with
passion for teaching online. This course is
designed to help you create your own Personas,
think about them, and also how you can
use this personas to refine and use them in
your design process. Personas are one of the essential tools when
it comes to design. So if you are designing a
product for your users, it's really important that you understand your users
really, really well. And personas act as a beacon
that helped you guide your user decisions
that you're taking and it helps you deliver are
User Centric product. In the end, with this course, we will delve into the things
like, what are personas? What are the things
that you need to do before you
create your personas? So we'll talk about user
research and how you can get data about your users
before you create personas. Then we will delve into the aspects of
creating a persona. What does a personal look like? How can you create
your own personas? And what are the things
that you need to consider? Then we will talk about
ways in which you can use personas into your
design process to help learn effectively. We will even take an example
of a hypothetical startup. And we will learn how we can create personas for the startup. And once we have
created the persona, how can we apply that Persona
into our design process? This course is designed
for users at all levels, whether you are an
entrepreneur student or a working professionals. This course will give you all the knowledge that you need, which will help you create effective personas to
understand your users needs. So what are you waiting for? Let's get started and I'll
see you inside the course.
2. How is this course designed?: In this particular class, I wanted to give you a short introduction of how
this course is designed. In the beginning, we understand
what are User Personas and what are the things
that you need to do before you create
user personas? So there will be things
like user research. You need to go out and
talk to your users. So how can you do all of that? That is something we will
have an overview on. Then we will actually talk about how you can create
your own Personas. And we will even to
an take an example of a startup or a product
that already exists. And we will learn how we can create personas
for that startup. Then, after we have learned
how we can create Personas, we will go ahead
and see how we can apply these personas
to design process. So if you're designing to solve a particular problem
within your app, what are the things that
you need to keep in mind? And how can personas
help you get there? So all these things we will explore with the help
of this example start. This is an overview of this
course and let's get started.
3. What are User Personas: So let us now start talking
about what are User Personas? User personas are nothing but the fictional representations
of your user base. So if you are building a product or if you're working
at your job, It's going to have a user base. And user personas just
represent that user base. No Persona also have the
detailed descriptions of this user base who represent
major user groups, vector mistakes, behaviors,
and cold Personas, important. So personas are important because they help you
understand your users. They help you humanize
your design process. And personas are critical in UX design because they help you understand what your users need. What are their behaviors? What are their frustrations or pain points? What
are their goals? So essentially, the
helped you be in the shoes of your users and
think from their perspective. They enable designers to
empathize for that users. And this helps in more
user-centric design. Let us take a look at some of the benefits of having
personas and user decides. The number one benefit is NPP. Like I said, personas help designers empathize
with the users. So you, as a designer, can keep yourself in
the shoes of the user. And this enables you to
design for user needs. Because you are now thinking
from the user's perspective. Focus. User personas help you ever designer to guide
decision-making. My focusing on user needs, and it helps to avoid personal bias if there
is any communication. Personas provide a
shared understanding of the User Group for the entirety within a
particular company. And this helps improve
communication and collaboration. Because everyone is
now thinking from that one user perspective,
success measurement. So since you now have a
clear definition of user, this makes it easier for you to measure what success looks like. That's about user
personas to summit up. User personas are nothing but fictional representations of your user base that enable you to think from
user perspective. And this helps a lot in
design making process
4. Understanding User Research for Persona Creation: Thinking about User Research
for Persona Creation. So in UX design, user research is one of the fundamental things to
understand your users. And user research is a process which involves
different methods, like interviews, surveys, observations to understand
your users better. It is with the help
of user research. You understand your
users and this helps you to create your
personas effectively. And these personas then Reflect your user base and who
is using your product. So this makes User
Research fundamental to understanding User Behavior,
needs and motivation. Let us start talking about the different user
research methods. The number one method
would be interviews, one-to-one interviews, wherein you call the
customer and talk to them. This gives you some insights
into User motivation, behaviors, attitudes, and so on. It helps for in-depth discussion
and it enables you to explore different topics that may not surface in
other research methods. Because here you are meeting face-to-face or over
video call to the user. So essentially you are
interviewing them. Service. So service can be
used to collect responses from a large
set of audience. And this can help you gather both qualitative and
quantitative data. This data can often
be used to validate some hypotheses that you have created or generated
from interviews. For example, if you have identified a problem
when talking to a user, in a user interview, you
might want to check if majority of similar people are having this
kind of a problem. And that is where you do
surveys to ask them questions. Or if you figured
out that a user uses a particular tool to
perform particular tasks, you might want to
understand if similar users in similar domain are
using a similar tool. This is where surveys
can be helpful. So you can go and
talk to everyone, but you have spoken to a few. Now we want to validate that hypothesis across
a last set of audience. And that is where service
comes into picture. Observations. Observation involves watching
your users interact with your product or service
in a natural environment. And this method is great to understand the
contexts of use, to identify the pinpoint
and to discover any unmet needs that
your users might have. So sure you give you a product to the user and you just observe them as to how they're using and what are they
liking, what they are not. User testing. This method allows you to understand the
usability of your product. If you have a product out there, you might want to see
if it's easy to use. So you might observe the users while they're
using the product. And this method helps
to understand the pain points that users are
facing with your product. Now whenever you are
conducting user research, asking the right questions
is really, really important. Because asking the
right question is all about getting
the right answers. There are few things that
you are supposed to keep in mind when you're
talking to your users. The number one thing would be ask open-ended questions, okay? Now, open-ended questions
allow your users to express their thoughts freely and they can provide
more details. So an example question could be, how do you feel when
you use a product? Question is really open-ended and user can go talking
in any direction. Another thing would be
avoid leading questions. Now what does this mean? So lytic questions are questions that prompt or encourage
the desired answer, or they assume something
about the question. So for instance, don't you think the product is the
best on the market? Now, this is a leading question. Here. You are already mentioning or assuming that your product
is the best in the market. So even if the user
does not think so, he might answer in
a particular way, then he's supposed to
avoid leading questions because this might not help you get the right
data from the user. Ask why. So asking why helps you
understand the reasons behind a particular user
behavior and user choices. Asking why always is really important when it
comes to user research. And lastly, just remember
that the goal of the user research is to
understand user needs, behaviors. And this can help you
create effective personas. Alright, so that's
about this class. I shall see you all soon. Thank you.
5. Analyzing and Understanding Data: Now you have conducted
user research and you have some data
around your users. What would be the next step? The next step would
be to analyze and understand the data that you have gathered from your users. Now the purpose of this exercise is to make sense of data, identify the patterns
in your data, and get the trends. Or you can even group similar users together
to understand them. This process allows
you to create a comprehensive user personas that will reflect your
actual user base. So let us start talking
about the steps involved here in analyzing and
Understanding Data in detail. So there are some steps
in mole over here. So whatever data that
you have gathered, It's really important that
you forced organize them. Now you could categorize
the data based on different criterias
like demographics, user behaviors, motivations,
goals, and so on. You might want to see
or understand how a user with a particular
behavior behaves. You might want to
understand how are User residing in a
particular location is performing a
particular task today. Using data
visualization tools or even simple methods like sticky notes can be
effective for this purpose. Now once you organize the data, it enables you to
analyze the data. By looking for insights
and connections. You might yourself notice a specific patterns within
a specific behavior. Or common pain points are shared motivations
among the users. And this step can be iterative. And you might land up something that will help you
with your product journey. The next step would be to identifying patterns and themes. So the purpose of
this exercise is to find the commonalities
in the data. And this might include
similar user behaviors, shared goals, or
common pain points. Now, if you are
identifying some patterns, this can help you guide the creation of
your user personas. In addition to patterns, you can work on teams as well. Now, teams are nothing but inside that apply to
large segment of users. For example, if you
notice that a user expresses frustration
with a specific feature, that can be a team creating user groups
based on your findings. So based on the patterns, themes that you have identified, you can start grouping
similar users together. And these groups will ultimately form the
basis of your personas. So user groups represent some distinct segments
of user base. And each group has a common
characteristic, behavior, need, or goal that will differentiate them
from each other. For instance, you might
have one user group who uses a product for
professional purposes. Whereas you might
have undergrowth, who uses it for
personal purpose. So these are two
different groups. And Remember, the goal of this exercise is to help you create user
personas effectively. This can help you in
design decisions. So this is how you
can analyze and think about understanding the data that you have gathered
from Research
6. Crafting Your User Personas: Welcome to this class. So in this lecture
we are going to talk about how can you start
creating your user persona. For the same, I have a persona template
that I have created. First, we're going
to begin talking about how you can
structure your personas. So to begin with, you need a basic structure and some specific fields
that will help you understand your users
depending on your business. So to begin with, you need a basic structure
of your personas, which will include some
specific fields that will help you and your business
understand your user base. I have added some fields that typically a persona would
have to begin with. I have the demographic
information. Here. You can see within
demographic information, I have the name, age, occupation,
and the location. Now name is not here,
a person's name. So name essentially is a fictional name
that you're giving to that particular persona. Or those group of users. Age will indicate the
age group or age range in which a persona falls into. Occupation will
represent or outline what they do for a
living and location. We'll talk about where they
are residing currently. Now, this may not be
the exact location. If exact location is something that does not
matter to your business. But if it matters
to your business, you can add like
location over here. Location can also
be really generic, like a rural area
or a tier one city, or a metro city or
something like that. So this is in general
information or some demographic
information about your user and does
not need to be exact. It can be generalized. Like you can have a general
name to this persona, or you can have an age
range for this persona. Then you have background. Now, background can
help you understand some characteristics
about your persona. And this can help you understand
your users even better. Then you have goals. So goals define what this persona or what this kind of person would want to achieve. There are some goals or motivations that this
particular user have. You should list them
down over here. Then you have frustrations. Frustrations are nothing but
the challenges, obstacles, or any kind of pain points that this particular user
or person is facing, then you have behaviors. Now behaviors would tell you how this person behaves in
different kinds of situations. And this will help
you understand them. Now here you can
mention tools and technologies that
your users are using. And this can help you take decisions when you're
designing your product. So in all this particular
template that I have enables you to lose down everything
about your users. Now one thing that I would
like to highlight over here that this is not
a final template, like it's something
that I typically use. But if your business
or product has some specific needs that you might want to
keep track off. You can modify this
particular template and add some more information as to what you might want to include depending on your users. So this is not the end or this is not something that
cannot be customized. This is just a starting
point that you can use to get your
personas created. Now, one thing I would like
to highlight over here that you can add a
photo over here. Okay? So a photo will help you
visualize this persona as well. So you can have a fixed
telephoto added over here, which you can then relate to. And you can share this
across within your company. So this will enable everybody to relate to
that particular picture. This is something optional
that you could do. Okay? You can even add a
short bio over here. So you can add a field
called biography. And you can keep track of biography for each
persona that you create. These are some additional
fields that I'm talking about which you can add provided your business needs to
track that photo is not for business photo is just
for yourself and the team. It helps you relate to the
Personas in a better way. That is option. This is something that
you can do on your own. But Bio can help
you keep track of more information about a users
if you wish to track them. So this is about Personas
and how you can create them
7. Exercise: Let’s Create a Persona for our own Product: So let us do an
exercise and understand how you can create the
personas for our own Product. Sure, we are going
to assume that we've worked for a
hypothetical startup. And our startup is
called Easy Ease. Now, easy ease is a nice
kit delivery service that aims to make home cooking
easier for busy people. Now, this service provides a box of ingredients and recipes, and these are delivered to
customers at their doorstep. Now, this box and we used by users to prepare
meals for themselves. So easy eats is
our startup today, and we're going to work
to create personas. So let us assume a scenario. Imagine that easy eats is looking to improve
on user experience. And it wants to understand
the users better. Now, they want to do this because they want to ensure that their website and our
apps are intuitive. So they have different
meal plans that catered to various users that have different dietary preferences
and a lifestyle needs. So we have meal plans
within application. Now our application
can be used as a web app or a
mobile application. Now what we add easy
ease out thinking is, can we make order and delivery seamless and as easy
as possible for our users. So this is a scenario that
we have wherein we wish to make ordering and
delivery seamless. Who are users? Now, the next step would be to do user research and analysis once we have identified what we need to
solve for the users. So we need to understand
our users and think of how we can make
product better for them. Now, the goal over here is
to understand your users. So we're going to conduct user interviews
and surveys, okay, so let's say we talk
to a few users, like ten users, and we conduct surveys across
the rest of them. And we got some data. Now with the help of data, we are analyzing some patterns. We figured out some patterns. Now based on these patterns, we have created
some User Groups. Now after creating user groups, we now need to move on
to create personas. So we now have some
the dot on the users. We have identified
some patterns. We have some User Groups. Now what would Personas look like for this
kind of a product? So here I have switched
on to document over here, and I have couple of personas
that I have created. So this is the first persona
that we are talking about. So let us go through
this persona. You have demographic
information first, and here you can have the name of this
particular persona. So you can see the name that
I have specified is busy be. Okay. This is a very
hypothetical name that I have given to my users. And what is the age group? So here the age
group is early '30s. What does this demographic
to occupation is? Project manager in
a fast-paced tech for and where do they live? They live in city center. So this is a demographic
information which gives me some overview
about my persona. Here I have some
background information. So Brenda is single. She does not have any children. Her job is demanding. And this takes up
a lot of our time. Now this gives me
an insight as to this particular user does
not have much over time, but she relies heavily on technology to manage
various aspects of life. Okay? So this user is tech friendly and she also relies on technology
for meal preparation. Now, she could rely on YouTube or she could use
some sources on her phone or laptop or Internet to help her
with meal preparation. Now Brenda enjoys
eating healthy, so this is a taste of the user, but she has to compromise many a times because of the
lack of the time. Since she does not
have much of her time, she has to sometimes compromise on eating
and the average. Now what is the goal of
this particular user? So this user has some goals. Number one goal is to find a food delivery service that can cater to hurt
time-sensitive schedule. So she has timescales
sensitive schedule and she needs a food delivery
service that can help her. She also needs to
maintain her aspect of healthy diet despite
of busy lifestyle. And she also wants to find time to improve
her own cooking skills. These are some of the goals
that this user has in mind. Now what could be some of
the frustration points? So this user struggles Quick, healthy meals that
can be delivered to her. She doesn't have time for
planning and preparation. And she often find ordering process of who build the
apps time-consuming. So these are some of the
frustration or pinpoints, I should say, of this
particular user. Now, having goals
and frustrations, or pinpoints can
act as a direction. So what does this
user want to do? And what does this
user does not like? Or is having a pinpoint in? With the help of this, you
can take your product and design decisions as to what to include and what
you can exclude. Two, satisfy this
particular user base. Then you have some
behaviors over here. So Brenda is digital,
like digital native. She's comfortable with
apps and online services. She often it's on the go and
do to help busy schedule. She needs to have these planned
and delivered promptly. So this tells you, okay, she might consider using your application because
she's always on-the-go. An app would work
really well for her. And meal planning
is something that will be great if you could
consider for your product. So this is what
it's telling you. Tools now render users variety of tools like she has a
variety of food ordering apps, relies on a smartphone
completely, like to manage many
aspects of a life. And she is used to using digital payment
options on quick checkout. Okay. So all this
information gives you some good insight into
this particular persona. Now let us take a look at one
more persona that a half, which is of Henry. So I've named this persona as
health-conscious Hendrick, and he's in his late 20s. So this is a different
kind of user base. And this particular user
works as personal trainer. And he lives in suburban. Okay, So this is the
demographic information. Now let's talk about
some background. So Henry is single and he spends a lot of
time on fitness. So he is, he loves goodness. This is what this tells you. He values balanced diet and tries to prepare
meals at home. So this gives you
some background into his diet preferences. And he has a busy
schedule, okay? And this leaves him
for very little time. Now this is similar
to Persona Y. So what this tells us is our user base has
very little time. If you can make something, but then your app that saves time for this particular user,
they are going to love it. Now what are the goals? Goal is to have a high
protein and low carb diet. Could discover new healthy
recipes and to find a food delivery service that can cater to his custom
dietary needs. So this is currently the goal. And frustrations. Points are like he struggles to find time for meal planning. And meal planning was time-consuming for
this particular personal as well, Brenda. And he has difficulty in
finding delivery options. And he needs more
variety in his needs. These are frustration points, are pain points, I should say. Then you have behaviors. This user searches for new workout plan and
diet plans online. He's tech savvy and he prefers to plan and schedule his
knees in advance. Alright. Now this is also similar
to the first group. So these two groups are having, are these two
personas are having similar behaviors vary
in their tech savvy. So which means they won't
have any problem using our app and prefer to plan
their meals in advance. So there's something
that we can think of. Then you have a list of tools. So these are
different tools that this persona Henry uses. This gives us a good overview and understanding
of our persona. So these are two sample personas for our hypothetical
startup, easy. Alright, so I hope you all have some clarity as
to how you can go to creating the Personas and how you can add different
kinds of information. You can add more information depending on your
startup or your product. You can add a picture
or you can add some more points that are
specific to your business. So that's about how you can
create your own personas
8. Applying User Personas in the Design Process: Let us start talking
about how can you apply user personas to
your design process. So the number one
step is you can incorporate the personas that you have created into
design thinking. Now what is design thinking? Design thinking is
a process wherein you would want to
empathize with your users, define the needs,
ideate on solutions, prototyping, testing, and so on. So essentially, if
you are willing to keep yourself in the
shoes of the users, personas can become a backbone for this particular process. This can help you understand user pain points,
needs, and wants. So if you're ideating
on a product, you can use personas to generate
a broad range of ideas. And you can imagine
how your personas will interact or use
with their product. And whether this particular
product or idea could help them address their
needs or pain points. So this is one
application of personas. Then you can even incorporate the personas into
design decision-making. Now, what does design
decision-making mean? So if you are creating designs, personas can help you guide or justify some design decisions. So each feature or a
design choice should be mapped back to the needs and goals of one
or more personas. If you're making
a design decision that does not serve
any of your personas, you should reevaluate
and you should think as to why you're making
that particular choice. Remember, personas are
a tool that can help you be focused on your users
while you are designing, creating users scenarios
with the Personas. User scenarios are nothing but stories as to how Your Persona would use your product in a particular situation to
achieve a particular goal. And this can help you consider
users perspective and explore some more context in which your product
would be used. So you can make use of
personas for this purpose. Personas can also be used
to create user journeys. Now what I user journeys. Now user journeys are step-by-step narrate is
that we'll describe how a persona might interact
with your product over a period of time
across different channels. And this gives you an unfortunate D to
understand as to how you can improve your
user experience to ensure that user needs are met. So incorporating personas in these ways can help
you ensure that you keep your focus on users
and don't divert from them. And by focusing on your users, you can create a product that is user centric, engaging
and effective. Let us now do an example
and let us see how we can use the personas that we
have created into design, decision and design
thinking process. Now let us do some
thinking and ideation to solve the problem of Brenda. We have already created a
persona that represents Brenda. Over here. We have some information about
this particular user. So if you have to take
a look at this user, this user does not
have much of her time. She enjoys healthy eating. And how cool is to find or
service that can help her maintain a healthy diet and also improve on
her cooking skills. And now we need to
think of ideas as to how you can create a
product for this user. So one of the ideas that you can consider is to add an
option for quick order. Now, this option can remember Brenda's past orders
and preferences. And this can help us save
some time or decision-making. You can even offer weekly meal plans for
this kind of users. Weekly meal plans is a
menu of the week with balanced meals delivered
daily at Hope referred time. So using this option, busy users could schedule meals or planned me
for the entire week. Then you can have express
delivery services. So using this quick or
express delivery services, users can save their time. And this can cater to their
time-sensitive schedule. You can use also nice to
get this three ideas. As you can see, these
ideas really fit in to these users and they will definitely
resonate with brain. Now, whichever user belongs to this persona will
like these ideas. Now personas can also help you with decision during design. Let's see at an
example for this. Since we know that Brenda is a busy and on
the go-to person, the user interface
should be simple. If you're working on a screen or if you're
working on homepage, you can think of having a reorder button to speed
up her order process. So if she has ordered
something previously, you can have an option from
where she can reorder. Now given how
time-sensitive schedule, you could have P0 and concise descriptions of different
food items so that Brenda can save a lot of time and can quickly
decide on what she wants. Payment options. You can have different
Easy payment options, like Apple Pay or Google P, which Brenda might
be already using. And this could help her expedite the checkout process with
the help of Personas. We are now using them to guide some design decisions
that we might encounter. Option for reorder
is really good and it will resonate
with this user. Descriptions and payment
options will also resonate. And since this user
is tech savvy, she will be having some online payment
options already set up. Let us see how you can create a user journey with personas. Now, user journey is nothing but a journey that maps out the
entire user experience. And it gives you an outline
of different steps they take. So let us see the journey of Blender to place an
order with our service. Easy eats. Brain now opens the app was she navigates
to have favorites. She chooses a mean and checks
out using the quick option, and she gets an
estimated delivery time. Now, since we are aware
of this persona and we know like this persona has less time Once everything quick. So this will be the tentative journey or
this particular user. And this helps you
create a series of steps in your mind when you're designing
for this persona. And lastly, who will arrive
after the order is placed. And Brenda, happy
with the service. So this really helps to
get the user journey, map out the different
interactions that user will have
without product. So that's about applying
personas in design. And with this example
of easy ease, we saw how we can
Create a Persona. Not only create how we can use this personas in
design thinking and decision-making
that will help us create realistic user
scenarios and journeys
9. Course Wrap-up: All right, so we have reached
the end of this course. So I wanted to shed
some light on some of the common mistakes that people do when
creating Personas. And also some of the
best practices that you should follow when you
create your own personas. So let us talk about
the mistakes first. So the number one mistake
that I see people do is they base their personas
based on assumption. So this is not the right way to go about creating personas. So always make sure that you're persona is back
by some research, data and analysis that has been done and not on the
basis of assumptions. Because creating
personas on the basis of assumptions can get you wrong
with your design decisions. Another problem could be
creating too many personas. So it is really
important that you keep your personas limited to a
certain set of user groups. Now creating too
many personas can dilute your focus and can lead you to a design that is not catering to any of the
Personas properly. So it's really
important that you limit your personas to
your core User Groups. Another mistake that
people often make is adding too many details. So it's really
important that you keep only the important details
that you need within your personas to help you
guide design decisions. Adding too many details can make things overwhelming and
difficult to understand. These were some of
the mistakes that people often make with
their User Personas. Let us now talk about some
of the best practices that you should follow
to work with Personas. The number one best
practice that I want to highlight is a regular
review and update. As you start working
on the product, it is really important that you review your
personas regularly. And this is important because
the market might change, your users motivations
might change, and even your product
might change. So over a period of time, it's really important that
you keep your personas updated once your personas
are created and set, it's really important
that you test your product with this Personas. And this is really important to understand that
you're going in the right direction or whether
you need some adjusting. The next practice
that I would want to share is share and discuss. So it's really important
that you shared the Personas across your
company or within your team, so that everyone understands the Personas and can
provide relevant inputs. This helps everyone
be on the same page. So these are the
three best practices that I wanted to share with you. We have reached the
end of this course and we have learned a lot about Personas and how
you can make use of personas to be
your guiding force. I would like to
thank you for being an engaged and
enthusiastic loner. With this class. You have a project
that you will find. And I would request
you all to complete that project and share it
with everyone with that. Thank you, and I shall
see you all soon.
Faisal Memon, Product | Engineer | Entrepreneur
