Case Analysis: How to build a user portrait for a product?

Wandoujia has been drawing user portraits ( Persona ) to help the team better understand the characteristics and behaviors of users, so as to more accurately judge the problems they face and their real pain points.

More importantly, Persona turns abstract users into concrete people. When we are obsessed with a certain functional point of a product, especially when making some emotional judgments, Persona will also remind us who is the person behind the product, what their daily life is like, and what challenges they face.

In the previous article “Persona: Who are we making products for?”, we shared with you the Persona that Wandoujia established in 2014. Today, we hope to use the process of Qingmang drawing Persona as an example to help you understand how to build the Persona of a product.

The main goal of Persona is to abstract a large number of users into more specific user images and extract common characteristics . Therefore, Persona is a fictional character created with some of the most typical user characteristics after summarization and refinement.

Every real user rarely fits completely into one of the Personas, but may find some of his or her own shadow in each Persona.

When using Persona, we should also focus on understanding user behaviors and characteristics, and avoid simply assigning a persona to every real user around us, especially ourselves.

According to the purpose of use, user portraits can be roughly divided into two categories: personas used for innovative design and profiles used for refined operations based on quantitative descriptions based on big data . Today we focus on the use of the former.

The key to "user-centric" innovative design is to understand users - in the minds of product designers, users should not be labels, numbers, or device names, but real people.

When using user portraits, startup teams should always keep this "real person" in mind and "empathize" with it - understanding the user's joy and troubles, so that they can better design products and meet user needs. This is the value of user portraits.

The basic method to establish Persona is to conduct in-depth one-on-one interviews with target users and organize and analyze the interview results.

Step 1: Determine the interview content

First, we need to determine the content of the interview, which depends on what kind of persona we want to portray. Generally speaking, Persona may serve product design or marketing ; the former focuses on user behavior, while the latter focuses on user cognition. Taking Persona, which serves product design, as an example, in order to help us more accurately determine user needs and pain points, from a practical perspective, the following attributes are indispensable:

Goal

The core demands of users. For example, for the music tastemaker’s portrait, the question he or she is most concerned about is “I listen to music all the time, but it’s hard to find amazing new songs.”

Use Case

Key behaviors x important scenes. For example, user A listens to music on his mobile phone on a bus.

Skill

Equipment, experience, etc. represent the user's skill level in the target field. For example, a Douban Radio user who listens to music on an iPhone and has collected 2,000 red-heart songs.

Story

The user's life status, especially the part related to key behaviors. For example, user C goes to a cafe to read books and enjoy a leisurely time on weekends, and sometimes encounters good music in the cafe. For user C, the song recognition feature will create magic moments for him and make him fall in love with the Music FM app.

Relationsh ip

The relationships between characters. For example, A will spread new information to B, and C will grow into A after accumulating experience. In terms of efficiency attributes, A>B>C, and so on.

Before the interview, we need to further clarify the key behaviors of users. Key behaviors refer to the parts of user behaviors that are closely related to the business. The core of Persona is the differences between the key behaviors of each portrait.

The users of Qingmang service are content consumers, so their key behaviors are content consumption behaviors such as reading articles, looking at pictures, watching videos, and listening to music on their mobile phones; therefore, we need to collect information on the frequency of users reading articles, the scenarios in which they watch videos, the number of comments and collections, etc. in interviews.

More importantly: we care about why they read articles, look at pictures, watch videos, and listen to music, and what impact such behavior will have on their lives? Why are these things important to them?

We need to conduct in-depth interviews with heavy users. For example, you can find people who use their mobile phones heavily for reading. Their rich usage experience will give you a lot of inspiration. This group of real users will teach you how to make products they like and how to design the order of product functions.

In addition, we also interviewed various roles in the team, including design, development, marketing, and operations, to understand which user behaviors and characteristics are helpful to their work decisions. For example, the operations team wants to know through which channels users discover the app, and the marketing team wants to know what brands and promotional activities users are more interested in. We will also collect this important information during the interviews.

Step 2: Interview

Next, we will collect basic data through interviews, gain a deep understanding of users’ key behaviors, and prepare the skeleton and flesh for Persona.

Interview as many target users as possible. If it is done by an experienced user researcher, at least 5 target users need to be interviewed for each Persona.

It is also important to choose the right interview users. The first principle is that the interviewees do have the key behaviors we care about.

We try to ask people who are familiar with them to recommend their friends as interview users, that is, "friends of friends". On the one hand, since they are not familiar with each other, they can still understand each other from a stranger's perspective instead of making preconceived judgments; on the other hand, because there are friends as a bridge, both parties trust each other, and users will be relaxed when talking to various details instead of avoiding and perfunctory.

Secondly, we should pay attention to "listen to both sides to gain a clear understanding"; according to the different scenarios where key behaviors occur, we should choose users with different life status and skill levels to listen to their opinions.

After all, our circle of friends has the risk of being too single, so we still need to ensure that the interviewees can fully reflect the characteristics of our users. When selecting users for Qingmang, we choose typical characters based on the different scenarios in which "people who remain interested in the world" use mobile phone content, such as salesperson A who travels frequently, freelance designer B who writes blogs and draws illustrations, clerk C who likes fitness and marathons, sophomore D who is full of curiosity, and so on.

At the beginning, "scenarios" may be a bunch of vague scattered points, but as we talk to more and more users, we can gradually collect typical user data for several major scenarios. At this point, the interview phase can come to an end.

During the interview, be careful not to mislead users into giving false answers that "cater" to you. At this time, it is more important to keep a certain distance from business goals psychologically. Questions should be mainly open-ended, asking more "how" questions and fewer "is it" questions.

For example, "How do you usually read articles on your phone?" "Where was the last time you read an article on your phone? What did you read?" When people recall their real-life experiences, many vivid details emerge, and you may gain a wealth of information and inspiration at the same time.

Step 3: Create a Persona Model

After obtaining the interview materials, we used the "behavior axis" to build the Persona model. You can understand the concept of "behavior axis" vividly through the following diagram. Each behavior axis can reflect the degree of difference in users' behavior.

We created behavioral axes for key behaviors and placed users on the behavioral axes based on the information collected from interviews. The exact position of each respondent on the axis is not important; their relative positions are more important. The clusters of respondent topics on different axes have significantly different behavioral patterns.

Behavior Axis Example

When we arrange all the interviewed users on the behavior axis and repeatedly adjust their relative positions, the following graph will appear. Because it is inconvenient to share the original information of Qingmang with you, here is a portrait of 15 fictitious user samples. They are roughly clustered into 4 groups, which can be distinguished by color after clustering:

Finally, we observe the clustering relationship of users on the behavior axis. Users who are close to each other on multiple behavior axes may represent a typical user role, and the behavior patterns they demonstrate will form the basis of Persona.

Step 4: The team works together to polish the Persona

No Persona should be designed by one person. At Qingmang, our team works together to refine and revise Persona through Design Workshop.

Everyone on the team will carefully study the interview information and record their observations of each user's behavior and characteristics. The following is the observation record of 5 users by 6 people in our team.

Step 5: Complete the Persona and display it

Finally, Qingmang’s user researchers and product decision makers will check together whether the dimensions and characteristic attributes of the Persona are complete, and then complete the description of the Persona.

We also produced Persona posters and posted them on the walls of the work area so that the team could spend time with our users at work and discuss the needs of target users at any time.

• Zhang Yan: A life lover who loves beauty, she is quick to buy things and is a believer in quality life.
• Wu Yi: An ignorant and ambitious young man, a curious baby, a rookie who dreams of becoming a great god
• Li Qiang: An efficiency-oriented elite, a rational thinker and pragmatist, and a logical thinker
• Bai Lu: A literary creator, a naturalist with a wide range of interests, and an internet celebrity who loves to express herself

As mentioned before, Persona is abstract and fictional. We have given them names, but they are not real users.

Step 6: Use Persona

Persona is a good tool , but what’s more important is how to use it well.

Make product priority decisions

According to the above process, 3-6 Personas will generally be produced. At this time, decision makers must determine the priority of each Persona based on external trends and internal company resources, and distinguish between the product's primary users, secondary users, and negative users (i.e. users who will not be paid attention to for the time being).

During the iteration process, we must always prioritize the needs of our primary users over those of other groups.

• Guiding product design: Persona should be established at the beginning of product design, so that the overall design will be better, allowing primary users to have a better experience and thus settle in the product
• Improve communication accuracy: When product managers communicate requirements, using Persona and its characteristics to make sentences can help everyone understand the requirements more accurately and improve communication efficiency. For example, when designing the note-taking function for Zhang Yan, we discussed like this: "Zhang Yan needs beautiful notes like a scrapbook."

Persona helps Qingmang clearly identify its users, allowing us to focus more on the product and understand users’ emotions and needs more deeply. At the same time, the establishment of Persona has greatly helped the team improve the efficiency of communication and decision-making.

We hope that our sharing today can also provide valuable reference for everyone in product design.