Creating Great Visual Content
Any technical writer would be able to tell you how often we get asked for visual content in our documentation. Visuals give so much value to our...
Consider that you are writing a user guide for the latest smart phone that is launched in the market. You know that billions of people across the world could be prospective buyers; people from different walks of life, people of different age groups and people with different mobile usage skills.
And, you want your document to satisfy all your user’s needs!
Is that even possible? Where do you start?
What if you started by classifying your target audience (smartphone users) into 3 groups based on their age? For example, Senior citizens (55 and above), Middle-aged adults (36 to 55 years), and young adults (18 to 35 years). And then, you then picked a representative from each group who you think would be a typical smartphone consumer in that group. What if you now designed your document based on the needs of those three people? Wouldn’t that be much easier?
That representative in each group that you pick, qualifies to be a Persona.
Defining a Persona
Personas are archetypes built to identify real users’ profiles, needs, wants and expectations in order to design the best possible experience for them.
A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not necessarily a real individual; rather, it is synthesized from the observations of many people, in this case, many prospective smartphone consumers in the specific age group.
So, what does a persona look like?
While a persona is usually a one-pager document, it is more than just a deliverable. What’s more important is that it provides a fundamental understanding of a user in the group.
Let’s take an example.
Meet Mr. Ram, a prospective smartphone consumer, who is a senior citizen.
From Mr. Ram’s persona above, we can gather that:
How Are Personas created?
Personas can be created in a myriad of ways, but you could follow this general formula:
Why Personas?
The bottom-line
Designers don’t always know what is best — but sometimes users do and that is what personas are for: to stand up and represent real users, since real users can’t be there when the design process takes place.
In your next project, consider how personas can ensure success, and satisfy the needs of all users!
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