User Operations: Are you sure you really understand user portraits?

When people perceive things, they always like to impose their own ideas, opinions, values ​​and habits on others, thinking that they are the same as others. This is the phenomenon of false consensus bias in psychology. People assume that they have a lot in common with others, but this is not the case.

When designing software, false consensus bias can cause us to make bad decisions.

Alan Cooper noticed this bias when he was thinking about why smart and talented people often design bad software. He pioneered the "role-goal" design method based on user portraits to help gain insight into target users and eliminate designers' cognitive biases. He detailed this approach in his 1998 book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum.

When designing, someone on the team will ask: "What if the user wants 'certain features'?" Cooper uses the term "elastic users" to describe users whose needs are erratic or not group-based. Good design decisions cannot come from such elastic users.

Suppose you want to design a software that can be used by hotel accountants, front desk staff, and gift shop salespersons at the same time.

Accounting requires concentration and focus on numbers. The front desk needs to switch tasks between the software and customers smoothly. When communicating with guests, they must make the guests feel warm and respected, and be able to quickly meet the guests' needs by operating the software. A gift salesperson may not be able to stay in front of a computer at all.

User portraits help designers understand the different needs of different employees, so that they can design software that can meet the needs of different groups at the same time.

1. What is “User Portrait”? Why use User Portraits?

User portrait is to transform a representative user group into a virtual and typical character. The development, design and product departments should treat this virtual character as a real user.

Personas should not be confused with individuals, although some organizations use them that way; although when designing, it is better to think of a persona as an individual than to not have any user in mind. But by focusing on individuals, designers will miss the broader, specific needs. A user profile represents a broad range of attributes and is the aggregate of all similar users.

User portrait is not a simple consumer classification, but a specific user image. This means that we don't describe it using abstract characteristics such as age range, but rather we characterize the image using a specific age or other specific characteristics.

Software development is always subject to time and money constraints. The Pareto Principle (also known as the 80/20 rule) tells us that typically 80% of work output comes from 20% of work input. And within the realm of user experience, having a product’s features and functions successfully satisfy 80% of the user’s needs will make users happy more easily than trying to satisfy 100% of their needs.

User portraits can help us understand what the most important 80% of user needs are and which are the 20% of needs that users don’t really care about. By creating a user persona (an image of a real user), we can empathize with consumers and think about their needs from their perspective. In addition, when communicating with stakeholders (such as investors), we can also use such a real user image to ensure that we can reach a consensus more easily.

2. How to create a user portrait?

How can UX designers create and utilize a persona-based “persona-goal” design approach?

Identify key user personas. If the number of personas to learn is too large, the audience will be cognitively overloaded. George Miller discovered that in the short term, the span of human memory is about 7 (±2) units. Beyond this range, human brain cognition begins to go wrong. This principle also applies to the number of user portraits. The software can have many secondary users, but the user portraits only need to focus on primary users. Preliminary research. Before you do any field research, learn more about the personas’ jobs. You can learn about the situation from internal stakeholders, collect some work information, and understand job responsibilities, salary and benefits, professional qualifications, etc. What kind of educational background is required for this job? Talk to people internally about their understanding of your personas. In addition, you can browse online to see if there are any articles written by your target user persona for further understanding. Learn as much as you can before moving on to the next step. Field research. Sitting down with target users, observing them at work, and asking them to talk about how they would train new employees can help them articulate what their job entails. User interviews. Understand what drives them to keep working? What is the hardest and favorite part of their job? What are their expectations? How do they view their role in the company? How is their performance evaluated? observe. Observe their work environment. Do they need to be very focused? Are they frequently interrupted? What is the noise level? How is the lighting? How to arrange the distance between desks? Do they work in teams or independently? Do they need to focus on multiple things at once or just one? Do they ask colleagues or the internet for help? Find assistive tools. Are there sticky notes on their desk or computer monitor? If so, what is written on it? Is that some of the information they are looking up? These may reflect that the software they are using does not effectively support their processes. Look for commonalities. Find 4 or so people with the same position but in different companies, and compare them to find out the common features of users.

Once you’ve found common patterns, you can create user personas.

To find the details of the user portrait, multiple analyses and adjustments are required. If there are too few details, the persona will feel lifeless. We need enough details to support our understanding of this person. It is not so important whether the user portrait has two cats or a three-year-old daughter. The more important information is: she is 24 years old, dropped out of college, has been working for three years, has some basic computer skills, and has no career plan.

3. User portrait examples

Let's take the hotel front desk as an example to do user portrait analysis. The user portrait will draw conclusions by analyzing the following aspects:

Demographic data : Female, 28 years old, high school education. Job Responsibilities : Greet guests, help them check in and check out, help with billing issues, provide local dining and tourist information. Hidden responsibility : Guests must feel the hotel’s hospitality. Salary : $9-15/hour Requirements : Good communication and interpersonal skills Pain points : The font of the software currently used is too small, and it takes most of the energy to find information, so it seems inadequate when communicating with customers. Goal : Work results are directly linked to customer experience and satisfaction, and communication with customers is very important. Quote : "I am the face of the hotel. My work determines the first impression of the hotel to the guests, so I must make the guests feel warm and friendly."

There are many templates for user personas, and designers who are not familiar with user persona research methods may find it difficult to find the key points. Different industries will have different user portraits. For example, a doctor’s user portrait does not need to state that he has a doctorate in medicine, but job responsibilities, goals, motivations, pain points, etc. are very important information.

Here are a few tips to make your personas more memorable to your team members - quotes can bring your personas to life or serve as personal statements, and names paired with job titles will make your personas' names more memorable to readers.

4. Use User Profiles

User personas come alive through use. To do this, the team needs to understand and be able to reference these personas. Once there are more than 5-7 personas, it becomes difficult to track and analyze user groups.

In real life, if you meet seven people in an hour, it is difficult for the average person to remember their names or backgrounds. And real people are always more dynamic and memorable than characters depicted in computer files. Breathing life into your personas is possible, but it can be an impossible task when the target group of your personas is too large.

We want our user profiles to be stable, but sometimes user research or feedback can bring in a lot of new information. Reshaping the user portrait will bring cognitive burden. We can try to use a story line to promote it, such as: the character in the user portrait gets promoted, or changes jobs, etc. Failing that, try using a kickoff meeting to introduce the changes.

In the 1990s, Cooper suggested that the description of the user persona be made into a page of paper and posted on the wall, one page for each user persona of a product, so that design team members can see it when they walk into the office every day. Even if team members cannot work together, there are still some options:

Introduce the personas to the team. Take the time to walk through the research process, show them the photos, and talk about the persona’s needs, expectations, pain points, personality, etc. Use personas in the requirements meeting. For example, “Would Fiona at reception want this feature? I think it might discourage her from talking to hotel guests!” Use personas in your user stories . “If I’m Fiona at reception, I want to be able to quickly identify which rooms are far from the elevator so I can arrange for quiet rooms for noise-sensitive clients.” When designing, take a moment to imagine how the software will be used by users in their work. Using the example above, consider how to find a room far away from the elevator, but focus on the customer rather than the software.

In general, user personas can help designers think beyond their own needs and understand the needs of people who actually use the product. This is especially important for office software, because many software developers are completely different from the users of the product.

The value of user portraits lies in their use. When more and more teams use user portraits, the user portraits will become more and more like real users, helping the team to design software from the user's perspective.

Source: Kayla Block