User Personas for UI - UX Design Projects

1. Class Intro: User personas really important for each project that you do because they're the ones giving you the real data about who are you designing for us so that you can make better design decisions based on your user research, you're going to understand who your user persona is and you can always refer back to it in your design process, not just you, but every single teammates in your theme. And you can easily refer back to it rather than just your users. You're going to use it as a user persona, which is going to personify it a little bit better, humanize it a little bit more so you can make it more approachable rather than just say, I'm designing for users. Here, designer Alex here, welcome to this Skillshare class about user personas in Adobe XD. I'm a digital products creator and so far I have created or 500 different UI UX products for designers across the world. I'm also a teacher and so far I have created over 30 different classes, all about Adobe XD, UI, UX design. And so far over 60,000 students have enrolled in those classes. We're going to talk about what a user persona actually is. What are some different kinds of research methods? Where to find your research participants, how to visualize your data, and how to use the template which I provided to visualize that data even further and share it with your teammates and your clients. Your class project for this class is to create your own user persona using the template which I provided. Make sure to check out the video about it, to understand more and to test it out for yourself. User research is really important because you're going to understand who you're designing for. And user persona is going to put the face on that data. So it's going to make it much more humanizing experience for everybody involved. So I look forward to see you in class and let's get started. 2. What is a User Persona: When you start your design project, you have to know who you're designing for. Otherwise, you're just going to design for everybody. And the design decisions you're going to bring to the table are not going to be valuable. Because later down the line, when people are not buying, when people are not signing up, your client is going to ask you why. And it's quite clearly because the target audience has not been defined. This target audience is been known as user persona. And instead of targeting an audience, in this case, you're just going to target a single person, imaginary person, but a single person nonetheless. But how can you know who is this single person you are targeting for your user persona? You're going to know that by doing your user research. By doing your user research, you're going to know who is your target audience and from that target audience, as I said, you're going to take and create this imaginary persona. You're going to use the real data and this is crucial here. Don't just use imaginary data because you think that your users might like a certain thing. Try to devise your persona from the specific user research that you did to get as much information as you possibly can. Now, you can imagine a quota to depending of your user behaviors or your user age or whatever. But try to pick up the crucial information such as age, such as job status, e.g. such as gender, such as the city or the country where your users are in. Try to collect the data and be as specific as possible so that you can know how to form your user persona the right way from the start of your project. Why to create a persona in the first place is quite simple. Just to refer it to as instead of user, you're going to refer it to as a persona, you're going to use once again, real data that you collected through user research. But you're going to attach a fictional name and a surname, a fictional job position to this persona so that you can treat it like a real person, even though this is just an imaginary person, this persona is, but as I said and keep repeating, you're going to use the real data, which is going to make it seem like a real person. When you move your project to development down the line, you're going to refer to this user persona by name and surname, like it really exists. And it's going to be much simpler to adapt and to make changes to the persona when you have it be as a real person rather than just saying your users or our users or whatever. As I said, you're going to focus this persona and designed specifically for this persona to make your design functional and to make it work for this persona, your user base from the start of your project. But how do you do your user research? That's what we're going to talk in the next lesson, where to focus and what to look out for. 3. Types of research methods: There are many different research methods out there that you can use for your project. And the way you can know which one to use is by the size of your project. If the project is smaller, obviously are not going to use the types that e.g. Google uses, or Microsoft or Apple. But you're going to form your type of user research according to the size of your audience and according to the size of your project. Because in my opinion, it's always better to start small and to adjust as the company grows, as the goals grow, as the user base grows. Then if you're just starting large n, if you're just focusing on this huge audience and then tried to distill it down a little bit. Then you need goals. You need the specific goal and a certain goal from your client to focus on, to focus your research on. So you cannot design for everybody, I think we mentioned in the previous lessons. So therefore, you need your user persona and same story for the user research. You have to understand what the goal is. What are you trying to solve? What is the goal of this project? What are some pain points? What are some weaknesses perhaps in the market that you're trying to explore with this product. So therefore, you have to understand who are you designing for and you have to understand what are your goals. Because if the goals are, let's sell as many of these products as possible. That's not a realistic goal. This is not a good goal. The goal here should be something like, let's try to, I don't know if you are focusing on, let's say a car industry. Let's try to sell these tires, which are going to last e.g. six months longer than the competition. And they're going to provide a much better grip than the competition. And let's sell it to, let's say, families in the downtown neighborhoods or cities. So these are some realistic goals that you can actually achieve rather than, let's sell million of these tires, but to who, how you're going to achieve this. So therefore, you have to set your goals. Then after you set your goals, you then can strategize as to which kind of user research you're going to approach too. Because as I said, when you're starting small, you don't need to test, let's say 200 users because you can just test five users and not waste your research resources, not to waste your time that waste your money in there to waste their time and their money by doing this unnecessary research, you can focus your research efforts on e.g. five to ten people. And from those groups, you can distill who is your target audience and who is your user persona. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about different kinds of user research methods. And which one can you choose for your project depending of your goals? As I said. 4. Quantitative VS Qualitative: When you get started with the project, you have to know what to focus on, as I mentioned in the previous lessons, but you also have to know which type of user research you have to choose. And there are many different ones out there in this lesson, I'm just going to name a few. And because this course is quite short, you can focus your efforts later down the line when you figure out which one is right for you, then you can distill it down and explore some more possible routes for your specific user research. But basically, you can divide your user research methods into qualitative and quantitative. Qualitative is actually something that you can distilled down into real numbers, into real data. While quantitative is actually to get as much data as possible. Quantitative can be something like user surveys or questionnaires online, where you can get as many different user inputs as possible. And then you can use qualitative research methods to focus that number down, to distill it down into actually understand what all these numbers mean. E.g. if you have thousand users from all around the world, that's quantitative data because you have quantity, then you're going to distill those users down using qualitative data to achieve actually the result that you're looking for, e.g. which country are those users located in? And then further down, which city are they located in? If you can, then you can understand what age they are and you can understand what device type they're using. You can understand the browser type, e.g. so when you have all of this data, that qualitative data, and that's basically you can separate it by quantity versus quality. Therefore, the names in question, there are also two more types, and these are attitudinal and behavioral. With attitudinal, it's basically your users attitude and behavioral is how they behave. So basically attitudinal is what they say. Behaviorial is how they behave. And for both of these, you can use different types of research methods, e.g. for Attitudinal, as I said previously, you can use questionnaires, you can use online forums. You can use something like Typekit to create a simple form. You can put it on existing website or you can send it via email to users and then you can see what they say. And this can be quantitative user research method because you are going to accumulate the quantity of information before you put it into quality. And then behavioral is something really different. This is for the later stages of your research, e.g. when you already have a prototype done, then you can put them in the same room as you are. And then you can do the quality testing, e.g. this is the behavioral method because you're going to see how your users are going to behave once they are in the room. You don't have to do this. You can use maize, e.g., which is what I use. And I'm going to link all of these resources which I mentioned in the PDF for this class. So make sure to check them, check them out and click and see all of these websites for yourself and explore them a little bit further. You can also use something which is called heat maps. Heatmaps require a certain set of devices to put on your juices head. But there is also software out there and heatmaps are basically what the name suggests, where the users are looking at is what, where the map is going to be the most heated, where they are looking at the list is where the map is going to be called e.g. so therefore, you can know where to focus your design efforts because your users are mostly looking at this rather than this. So you can focus your important messages, e.g. on your page, on the specific part of the page where users are looking the most. So if you think that the tax should be better off here, but none of your users are looking in that direction. Then try to see where they are looking at. E.g. if they're looking in this direction, maybe put the text dare. If the text is most important part of that section of your page, e.g. so that's behaviorial. You can track how your users are behaving in real time. So once again, depending on your research method of what your goals are, what you're trying to accomplish with your research. Make sure to use quantitative data first so that you can accumulate the data from your users. And then try to use qualitative data to get some real numbers that you can work with and present them to your clients, e.g. so that you can show them the research findings that you found and then you can use those research findings later in your design. Also, don't forget attitudinal. So what is their attitude, how they say they're going to react? And then behavioral how they actually react when you present them with a test, with a prototype, with the design with a website, and you actually ask them to test it in real time, either in front of you or online. In the next video, we're going to talk about choosing your participants. If you don't have any participants and if you already have an existing audience, what is the difference and how to choose between both of those. So I'll see you there. 5. Choosing your participants: Choosing your participants is crucial part of your user research because if you choose the wrong participants, your outcome of the research is not going to be valid. Therefore, your research is really pointless and you wasted your time, everybody else's time and your clients money because in majority of cases you really have to pay for any kind of user research that you do. So therefore, it's really important to choose the right participants for the right type of research that you're going to do and to choose the right amount of participants for that specific research. How to choose participants? Well, there are really two different kinds you can choose from existing audience. This is if your clients, client has a website, they have an app, they have an email list. And you can really reach out to these potential client, customers. And you can really ask them for their opinion and for their time. And then you can really conduct this user research that way because you already have that existing audience. The other way to do it is with non-existing people. That's if your client's business is just getting started. And then you have to find these participants to participate and how to do that? Well, there once again, two different methods for this. It's with people in person. So you can really meet with different people face to face and you can do your testing debt way or to do it online. And you're going to choose one or the other based on a simple thing. Is your client local and is their audience going to be local? Therefore, you're going to most likely choose in-person. You can also choose online but to filter to your country and to your region and to your city, e.g. but if your client's audience is going to be global, therefore, the best method is to choose these people online. I'm going to leave a few links, the PDF to this class, where you can click through these various different websites where you can find different audiences to do your research and your testing. And these websites are obviously going to charge you for it. So it's really important if you're going to do this freelance to charge this into your client's bill. You can separate this form from your service, e.g. you can factor in the entire design process as one charge and then charged this, the separate charge. Or you can factor all descend from the start. Maybe it's the best way to approach. It may be charged the UX part of your project separately and then UI part and perhaps development part later separately because you already have all of this information from your UX part. And then when you move into the UI part and the actual creation of your design, perhaps it's better approach to charge that separately. I'm just telling you this because oftentimes you're going to get user research which is not really all that compelling. What this means is perhaps you ask the wrong questions. Perhaps you didn't get the right amount of people and all of this researcher client is going to have to pay. Sometimes if your session is e.g. 30 min long, you're going to have to pay for people to sit down for 30 min and to listen to you asking them the questions, or to fill in the questionnaire, or to test your prototype, or to test your hypothesis. So whatever it is, you're going to have to pay these people. So it's really important to understand right from the start that you have to build your client for this specific service. Or you can price your project completely separately. So UI design and the delivery is going to come as one charge. And the UX design is going to be its own separate thing, especially with this user methods and user approaches and stuff like that. With real people, it's much more easy because you're going to actually sit with them. You're going to prepare your list of questions upfront. We're going to ask them these questions and sometimes if you are paying them for 30 min, oftentimes you're going to find that your talk is going to last for all in 15 min so you can pay them half the price and stuff like that. But once again, it's really important to factor this expense into your project expense. Because oftentimes it can be really expensive. These people, and you're going to see on these websites which I'm going to link in the PDF, are going to charge anywhere from $20 per hour all the way up to $200 per hour, depending of the user research method you are going to do on these users. And depending on, if you have e.g. five users are 20 users. You can clearly see that this expense is going to be vast. But it's completely different story with your existing users because you can approach your existing users and you can offer them some kind of a discount either on existing features or product, or a future feature or a future product that your client is going to launch it down the line. But be really careful with your existing users because oftentimes there is a bias because most of them possibly already like that product that they're using. So they are going to be quite biased with the responses they're going to give to your research. So make sure to factor all of this and make sure to check out the PDF which I'm going to provide, as I said, to click through all of these links to the websites where you can find these user research testers which are going to come to your project and come to your rescue. Basically, wherever you are in a row, just make sure to factor in the expenses for this particular project. 6. Visualising your data: When you have your research information, oftentimes it's going to be really chaotic because let's just imagine that you have ten questions for each of your participants. Let's say that you are doing a user survey. You'll have ten questions, you have ten different participants. So therefore you're going to get 100 different answers. So how to factor all of this n? Well, there are different templates online that you can find there completely free and they're used for majority of the industry where e.g. inside of the Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets, you can include this template that you get and it's going to calculate your responses based on whatever your users are going to say. Or if you're using something like quantitative methods and e.g. you set up a landing page and you want to see how many clicks you're going to get. It's better to use Google Analytics because their amount of information that you get from Google Analytics is just vast. So you have to understand and you have to organize it in some way so you can factor it then across our let's say a week of time or two weeks of time or amount of time depending on how long you're testing is going to be. And therefore, you can factor all of that information later. At the end of the day, when you do, you're going to form in your user persona. We're going to get to it in the next lesson, we're going to actually give you a template which you can fill in. And I'm going to walk you through a little bit more as to different information that you can put into that template. But it's really important to visualize your data and finally, to present it to your client before we move on to the design process. Because oftentimes your clients are going to have a little bit different inputs that you do. So it's really important to show them the data and e.g. to combat whatever they have to say. If it is a bit different because they wanted to believe to be different, but the actual data is showing different. Therefore, it's really important to show them that data, to visualize that data for them to afford easier understanding. So e.g. if you're using XD or Figma or Photoshop, whatever software, make sure to create a bit of a template where you can present that data using icons, e.g. using different images so they can easily understand the data that you're going to get, because the data you're going to get is usually just text. And text is really difficult for people to understand. So visualizing that data is going to be much easier for your clients to understand and to approve for you to move forward with the design process. As I said in the next lesson, I'm going to give you a XD template, which you can use and visualize your data once you actually get it and put it into user persona. So I'll see you there. 7. Creating Your User Persona: In this lesson, I'm going to give you an Adobe XD template for user persona creation. And you can use this template for all of your future work. And I'm also going to share with you different sections that you can use for this template and the future templates that you are going to create. So let's get started. So here I am in Adobe XD and as I said, you're going to get this template. Make sure to check it out in the class resources. And when you click right here, which says Libraries, you're going to see all of the different colors which are used, which you can obviously change. You can simply right-click, hit Edit and whichever color you choose. As you can see, it's going to update. Just make sure because we have this gradient. If you're going to choose this color, e.g. to right-click and to copy come right here where it says gradient hit edit, and then click on this top because that's the yellow stuff. Hit Control or Command V to paste it in. And you're going to have exactly the same color as I did right here. Or you can simply sample it from here and you can see it's going to update right here. So that's just a tip about the color. Same story goes for character styles. This is Poppins. You can use any kind of character styles that you want. I purposely didn't use any icons to keep things really simple and concise. So you can use different kind of components. You can use different videos if you want to present your user persona as a real person, you can print this by simply saving it out as a PDF. You can call right here, hit Control or Command E right here. And then you can simply use PDF e.g. you can export it, you can export that as an image to print it out. Or you can export as PDF or image and share it with your clients online for easier understanding. But once again, let's wrap this up. It's really important to have your user persona is really important to understand where you are designing for. It's really important to share this information across the team. You might be working in. Both your client, stakeholders, marketing team, developers, all of the other designers, everybody in the team knows that. This is, in this case Marcus Morris, e.g. so this is our user persona. So how everything is structured is about section right here. And you can edit all of these sections. You can see them right here. When I click the Layers panel, you have your user image, which is this one about which is this top section. Then we have needs, we have frustrations, social media, and finally, favorite brands. So About section is who is this user actually? And what they are about. You're going to once again understand it from your user research. So let's use existing users, e.g. if you're using, let's say Google Analytics, you're going to understand that majority of your users are, let's say male, in this case, they are from London, UK. So you're going to give it a name, let's say markers. And he loves walks with this two-year-old daughter and wife who cares deeply about your environment and what better future for his daughter. You're going to understand this from your fuel, further research. So you're not just going to use Google Analytics in this case, you're going to actually reach out to these potential people based on your Google Analytics. You're going to note the age because you can see the age range right here. And you're going to know the location right here. So therefore, you can further tweak who are you targeting tube. So you can reach out to these potential people and understand what they're about. So this person has said that he has a daughter, e.g. he has a wife. He cares deeply about the environment. He's passionate about all of these things. So you're going to put this into About section occupation. They're going to tell what they do income. If they don't tell you the income, you can easily figure it out from the research you can do online because there are many different researchers out there for every country in the world. So you can put the income right there from the income, which is once again really important. If they tell you, if not, you can figure it out yourself by doing some online research from the income, you can understand how much can this user actually spent on my website. So if this is not the right user for me because their income is too low, perhaps on targeting the wrong user because my products for services or too expensive for this particular user. So you can see why this research is really important. Once again, you can understand this by doing any kind of user research which we just mentioned previously. You can do card sorting, e.g. you can do your questionnaires, you can do your, let's say user logs where user tells you something about them every single day. And you can do something like surveys, e.g. where you can find out who these people actually are, then you can reach out to them and ask them these specific questions or any other questions that you need to know based on your goals. Once again, really important. Once you need that, you can understand their needs because you can ask them, what are their frustrations, what are the needs? What they actually need from a product like this? And therefore, based on the answers you're going to get, you can filter that out into this specific section. In this case, because I chose a card brand just out of nowhere, It's better way to search for a used car on lines. Let me collapse this and zoom in a little bit so you can see it a little bit better. So better way to search for a used car online. This person wants to find a used car online, but they are just confused with all of these different offerings out there. Easier way to understand the car he looks at. So majority of times you're going to see all sorts of different information on this car websites and just basically some sort of a code that people in the car industry understand. But people outside of the car industry don't really know what they're looking at. So they need an easier way to understand what they're looking at. Easy approach for inquiring about the vehicle. So in many cases is just an email form. Perhaps I want to direct telephone number, maybe I want to use WhatsApp or messenger or y-bar or whatever that you are using. Frustrations, too crowded and confusing websites, which is majority of cases. Once again, relating back to the information overload that the industry uses. Websites are not mobile friendly. In majority of cases, your users are going to use mobile devices these days. So if the website is not mobile friendly, It's a big red flag. Heat sink, a posting without a price. So they want transparency. They want to understand whatever current they are looking at. How much does it cost? So they want to see the transparency. It's going to attract them more to that ad and possibly purchase sooner. Social media habits. So Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn. Why is this important for your marketing efforts? Later down the line? And favorite brands, you want to see who the favorite brands are. Because from these favorite brands, you can perhaps choose a style cues later for your design. Let's say that if you see a pattern, e.g. huge images and crisp text, maybe black on white or gradients or images of people that you really like and it attracts them back to these websites. Dan, you can perhaps visit them and take cues for your specific design or redesign, whatever you're trying to do. In this case, I just stumbled in a bunch of these different logos, but your users are actually going to give you a specific set of brands. Make sure to write them down and make sure to put them here to inspire yourself. Finally, we have something like a quote. You can choose this quote and you can ask your users, do have a favorite quote. If they don't, then you can simply find something online to put here. And finally, what I wanted to show you is we have image gradient, I'm going to hide it. We have an image I want to drag and drop my image, bring back the gradient. And now when you put a face on top of your user persona, it actually gives it that personality. It actually shows you the person you're trying to design this website for some. One final thing I want to add right here is these are just the sections for this specific user persona template. You can add a bunch of different sections, once again, depending of your goals, depending of your research here. So e.g. maybe you want to add a specific tags that your users mentioned. Maybe their feelings, maybe they're feeling sad, maybe they're feeling happy. So you're going to know the colors you're going to use. You're going to know the pacing, you're going to use the topography, the layout based on everything that your users are going to tell you in your research. You're going to put that in your persona and you're going to reference always back to this persona to remind yourself and to remind your team. If somebody wants to use, let's say, a black color and it's kinda pinkish websites, so it's not going to work quite well. You're going to always refer back to the persona template to understand a little bit better and to remind yourself and your team, who are you designing for? So here is that user persona template. Make sure to check it out, download it, use it. Make sure to replace all of these sections that you think are not necessarily for your specific research. As I said, you can simply go back to here and I'm going to go back right here. If you want, you can make this image a lot smaller than you can e.g. position this section to be right here. You can play around with whatever you want with this template that given it away completely for free. So make sure to explore it and to create your perfect user persona. 8. Class Project: For your class project, I want you to create your own user persona. Makes sure to use the template which I provided, or you can create your own template. There are many different templates online, so you can even use those and make sure to change the colors, make sure to change the font just to make it look a little bit different. It makes sure to put in your information inside. I'm looking forward to see what you guys can create and I'll see you in the project section. 9. Conclusion: So there we go, we reach the end of this class. I really hope you got a better grasp as to what a user persona actually is, how to get to it, and some steps along the way. Thank you so much for watching this class. Make sure to check out the PDF which I mentioned, which has all the resources inside. Make sure to check the XD template and play around with it, and make sure to explore some possibilities with user personas. Because as I said multiple times throughout this class, they are really important for your business and they're really important into shaping the future of your products and services and what you're trying to accomplish based on your goals. Thank you so much for watching. Make sure to check out my other classes and until next time. Take care.