User operations: 4 types + 10 steps to explain user portraits in detail!

User portraits are fictional characters that companies can create based on their business indicators. User portraits can help us understand user needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. It helps us realize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it also helps us identify which users are actually interested in us. Portraits make our design tasks less complicated, they guide our ideation process, and they help us create better user experiences for our target users.

As opposed to designing products, services, and solutions based on the preferences of the design team, it has become standard practice in many human-centered design disciplines to distill data and certain trends from research and personify content. Therefore, the user portrait does not describe a real person, but a character composed of real data collected based on the characteristics of multiple people. User portraits largely add a human touch to cold facts.

Personas provide meaningful prototypes that we can use to evaluate our designs and development. Personas will help us ask the right questions and answer them from the perspective of our target users. For example, “What are these people thinking, feeling, doing, and saying?” and “What underlying needs are we trying to meet?”

[Orient Securities User Portrait System Case Study Click here to read the User Portrait System Case Study]

1. Look at user portraits from 4 different perspectives

In her article, Lene Nielsen, PhD in Personas and persona expert, describes 4 different types of personas to ensure they bring the most value to our projects.

Goal-oriented

This type of user profile gets straight to the point. It focuses on: What does my typical user want to do with my product?

The goal of goal-oriented personas is to examine which processes our users prefer to use in order to achieve their goals when interacting with our product or service. The premise here is that we have done enough user research to determine that our product is valuable to users. The goal-oriented profile is based on the ideas of Alan Cooper, an American software designer and programmer known as the "Father of Visual Basic."

Figure 1. Image from the article

Role Perspective

The role-based perspective is also target user-oriented and also focuses on behavior. Role-based portraits contain a large amount of qualitative and quantitative data, and the role-based perspective focuses on the user's role in the organization. In some cases, our designs need to reflect the roles our users play in their organizations or in their wider lives. Studying the roles our users typically play in real life can help us make better product decisions.

Where will the product be used? What is the purpose of this role? What business goals does this role require? Who else is impacted by the responsibilities of this role? What is the function of this role? Jonathan Grudin, John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin are proponents of this type of portrait.

Character attraction

“Compelling portraits are rooted in the engagement and insight generated by stories. By understanding the characters and the story, fictional characters can be described vividly and realistically, with the goal of changing their stereotypes. Some personality perspectives do not focus on the whole person, but only on behaviors, which leads to the risk of stereotyping.” - Lene Nielsen

Character-attracting portraits can include both goal-oriented and character-perspective-oriented portraits. Personas are meant to engage the designers who use them. The main idea is to first create a three-dimensional user portrait based on the user. The more people involved in this portrait, the more likely they are to take the user's needs into account during the process design and provide them with the best product. These personas focus on the user’s emotions, psychology, and context and make them relevant to the task at hand. This perspective emphasizes how stories bring characters to life, which is one of the ideas advocated by Lene Nielsen.

One of the main difficulties with this type of portrait method is that it must involve participants and be used. Later in this article, we will introduce Lene Nielsen's model, which solves this problem by creating 10 steps.

Figure 2. Image courtesy of Terri Phillips

Fictional

Unlike other types of personas, fictional personas do not come from user research but from the design team’s experience. It requires team members to make assumptions based on past interactions with users and paint a picture of a typical user. There is no doubt that these personas may have serious flaws, and we can use these persona requirements as initial sketches to involve them in the early design process, but it is worth noting that these fictional personas should not be regarded as a guide for us to develop products or services.

2. 10 steps to create a character

As mentioned above, Persona Engagement Personas include both goal- and role-oriented personas that emphasize engaging stories and bringing personas to life. These 10 steps cover the entire process from initial data collection, to analytical use, to ongoing development of portraits. It is mainly divided into four parts:

• Data collection and analysis (steps 1 and 2)
• Character description (steps 4 and 5)
• Scenarios for problem analysis and idea development (steps 6, 9)
• Involvement of approved design team (steps 3, 7, 8, 10)

These 10 steps are an ideal process, but sometimes it is not possible to include all the steps in a project. Here we outline the 10 steps described by Lene Nielsen in her Encyclopedia of Interaction Design Fundamentals article.

1. Collect data. Collect as much information about the user as possible. Conduct high-quality user research with actual users in your target user group. In design thinking, the research phase is the first stage, also known as the empathy phase.

2. Form a hypothesis. Based on our initial research, develop a general idea of ​​the various types of users within the project's focus area, including how they differ from one another.

3. Everyone accepts the assumptions. Accept the hypothesis and determine whether the difference hypothesis between users is true.

4. Create data. We need to decide how many personas we will ultimately create. Usually we want to create many personas for each product or service, but in the initial stages it is best to choose only one persona as the main focus.

5. Describe the portrait. The purpose of working with personas is to be able to develop solutions, products and services based on the needs and goals of users. It is important to describe the portrait in this way so that you can understand the user with enough understanding and empathy.

• The persona should include detailed information about the user’s education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and behavioral patterns.
• Add some fictional personal details to make the portrait a realistic character
• Give each portrait a name
• Create 1-2 page descriptions for each persona

6. Prepare the situation or setting for your portrait. The purpose of a persona attractor is to create a scenario that describes a solution. To do this, we should describe some situations that might trigger the use of the product or service we are designing. In other words, we can bring each persona to life by creating scenarios featuring that persona.

7. Gain recognition from the organization. The goal of this profiling approach is to engage project participants, which is the common thread throughout these 10 steps. Therefore, involve as many team members as possible in the development of user portraits and obtain buy-in from participants at each step. To achieve this, we can choose between two strategies: we can ask participants for their opinions or let them actively participate in the process.

8. Spread knowledge. In order to get team members involved, the portrait description method needs to be spread to everyone. It is important to decide early on how to disseminate this knowledge to those not directly involved in the process, future new employees, possible external partners. Knowledge dissemination also includes how to make the underlying data accessible to project participants.

9. Everyone prepares the scene. A portrait by itself has no value until it becomes part of a scenario and starts to play a role in the product story. Only then does it truly begin to have value.

10. Iterative adjustment. The last step is to describe the user's future life. You will need to modify your descriptions of personas regularly, such as rewriting existing personas, adding new personas, or deleting outdated personas.

3. Describe the user portrait

To give the public an understanding of the details of the character’s education, lifestyle, interests, values, goals, needs, limitations, desires, attitudes, and behavioral patterns. We added some fictional personal details to make our portrait a realistic character and gave her a name. The following describes in detail:

background

Christie now lives in a small apartment in Toronto, Canada. She is 23 years old, single, studying anthropology, and works as a waitress in her spare time.

Interests and values

Christy enjoys traveling and experiencing other cultures. She recently spent her summer in Rwanda as a volunteer.

She prefers to read at home in the evening rather than go to the bar, and also likes to stay at home or in a quiet coffee shop with a small group of friends. She doesn't care much about appearance and fashion, what matters to her is values.

She loves drinking tea and often cooks healthy meals herself, although she prefers organic health foods, which she cannot always afford.

Computer, Internet and TV use

Christy owns a MacBook Air, iPad, and iPhone. She uses the Internet to conduct her research and decides on the books she wants to read and purchase based on user reviews. Because she doesn't want to buy a TV, Christie listens to music and watches movies online. She thinks TV is outdated and she doesn't want to waste her time watching TV shows, entertainment programs, documentaries or news that she has no right to choose.

Her day

• Christie wakes up at 7am, eats breakfast at home and goes to school at 8:15am every day.
• According to her schedule, she arranges her time to study or attend classes. She has 15 hours of master's courses and 20 hours of self-study per week.
• She had lunch with her study friends
• She continued to study
• She left for home at 3pm. Sometimes she continues to study at home for 2-3 hours.
• She works as a waitress in a small eco-restaurant three nights a week, from 6pm to 10pm.

Future goals

Her dream future life is to combine work and travel. She wanted to work in third world countries and help ordinary people who were not born into wealthy societies. She's not sure if she'll get married and have kids, but not right now.

4. Ending

The approach to developing personas has its roots in IT systems development in the late 1990s, when researchers began to wonder how best to convey an understanding of their users. Then various concepts emerged, such as user prototype, user model, etc. In 1999, Alan Cooper published his successful book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, in which he described personas as a method we can use to describe virtual users.

In short, user portraits are, to some extent, fictional characters that we can create based on our research to help us understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals, help us better identify and understand our target users, and create a better experience for them.

Related reading:

1. User operation: new funnel model for conversion analysis!

2. User operation: How to use B-side operation thinking to increase user growth?

3. Product operation: How to use data analysis to drive product user growth?

4. APP user growth: One model solves 90% of growth problems!

5.How to increase users? Take Pinduoduo and Xiaohongshu as examples

6. Triggering user growth: Is user operation just about attracting new users?

7. User operation: What else can you do to attract new users without fission users?

8. User operation: how can financial products awaken dormant users?

9. User operation: How to make use of private domain traffic?

author: Polished like jade

Source: User Behavior Insights Research Institute