Super detailed! Summary of the process and methods of building user portraits from 0 to 1

As a design tool, user portraits can help designers break out of the inertial thinking of "designing for themselves", focus on target users, discover core values, and empower products.

Preface

In the process of product development, product, design, and R&D personnel often mention words such as "we need to design for target users" and "who are our users". It can be seen that identifying target users is crucial in the process of product development. As a design tool, user portraits can help designers break away from the inertial thinking of "designing for themselves", focus on target users, discover core values, and empower products. They are widely used in various types of Internet products.

This article will introduce the concept and value of user portraits and how to build user portraits from 0 to 1. I hope that after reading it, you will understand the relevant theories of user portraits and it will help you to conduct in-depth learning of user portraits in the future.

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What is a User Profile?

There are currently two commonly used user portrait concepts in the industry, one is User persona, and the other is User portrait, which is also translated as User profile.

The first type of user portrait, User persona, is a representative virtual user model abstracted from the product's observation of the real world, according to Alan Cooper's "About Face". It is sometimes called a composite user archetype. This concept was first proposed by Alan Cooper in his book "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" and has been continuously improved in many books.

The main features of this portrait are as follows:

1. Describe a user persona including role description and user goals

The role description here refers to name, age, position, income, occupation, etc. This type of role description is mainly to make the user portrait richer, more real, and concrete; the focus is on user motivation, and user goals are their motivation.

2. Can represent similar user groups or types, or individuals

User persona is abstract and virtual, representing a typical user group. Although it can also represent individuals, individuals are not actually independent individuals, but are synthesized from actual observation and research.

3. Must be context-specific - product-specific behaviors and goals

User persona studies the user's use of the product in a specific context, focusing on their behavior, attitude, ability, motivation, etc. within a certain range. Even for the same persona, the motivations for different products are different. Generally speaking, it is not easy to reuse between different products, and it is necessary to consider the entry scenarios of different types of products.

The second type of user portrait, namely User portrait, refers to the labeling of user information. It collects multi-dimensional information data of users (such as demographic attributes, social attributes, behavioral preferences, consumption habits, etc.), and conducts statistics and analysis on them to abstract the overall picture of user information. Compared with user persona, it focuses more on data mining and labeling system construction.

The main characteristics of this type of portrait are as follows:

• Authenticity: It collects real information about each individual, such as static information like demographic attributes, as well as dynamic information about user behavior.
• Timeliness: User dynamic information is not static and its changes can be tracked in real time.
• Wide coverage: It can monitor both the content that users are interested in and the content that they are not interested in, with many dimensions and coarse and fine granularity.

Here is a brief comparison of the differences between these two types of user portraits:

This article focuses on the first type of user persona. As for how to create data portrait labels and applications, it will be introduced in later articles and will not be repeated here.

The value of user portraits

As a design tool, user portraits are used throughout the product life cycle. Combined with several stages of design work, the value of portraits is mainly:

• Before design: Help establish product positioning and goals
• During design: Help establish design goals, design strategies and guidelines
• After design: promote other work, such as marketing, operational activities, sales planning

User portrait construction process

In general, user personas often use qualitative research methods to divide roles. The main sources of information include: anthropological research, situational surveys, observation, interviews, desktop research, etc. The specific implementation will be slightly adjusted according to the business situation.

This article combines the experience of Kujiale-Kuaida and Yingke two business lines to sort out the process and methods of building portraits from 0 to 1, as shown in the following figure:

Step 1: Establish goals and portrait dimensions

Clarify business goals and user roles. Different roles and goals will have different requirements when collecting information, which will affect the final portrait results. Therefore, before making a portrait, you need to consider the purpose of the portrait. After clarifying the goal, you can combine the goal and the role to develop the portrait information dimension.

There are 2 points to note here:

• What is the general information?
• How to filter out target users?

Regarding the first point, the general information dimension can be combined with the elements of the user portrait and selectively extracted according to the business situation. It should be noted here that there are some differences in the information dimensions of to C and to B. For example, to C products will focus on the user's gender, age, family situation, hobbies and habits, while to B products will pay less attention to these. They will focus more on the user's work ability, work content, use of work, etc.

Summary of elements of user portrait:

Regarding the second point, since we are creating user portraits, we need to cover as many different users as possible. So who should we find to conduct the research? Here are two tips.

Tips1: User screening conditions

Find products and operations that are closely related to the business, and discuss and determine user types. During the discussion, we will define eligible users, come up with a user screening criteria table, and then invite users based on this table.

Tips2: Job function screening

For some B-type products with clear job functions, users can be found based on job functions. In practice, it is necessary to consider the actual situation to see whether it is necessary to distinguish between management positions and ordinary execution positions.

Taking the KuaiDa intelligent design business line as an example, in the user portrait project

• Business goal: Comprehensive understanding of user characteristics, product awareness, usage scenarios and pain points
• Target users: The goal is to first have a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the users of the QuickTake tool. In the questionnaire method, both D-end and B-end users who have visited and opened QuickTake are counted. When deeply exploring the scenarios and pain points, combined with the feedback from the questionnaire, the D-end and B-end focus on finding active users and subdivide the user identity types.

The combination of these two finally sorted out the user portrait dimensions of KuaiDa.

Step 2: Establish research methods

After establishing the dimensions of the portrait information, it is necessary to select the appropriate research method to collect information based on factors such as users, time, energy, and funding. There are three commonly used research methods:

• Qualitative research: such as interviews, secondary data research
• Quantitative research: such as questionnaire surveys and data analysis
• Qualitative + quantitative: a combination of the above two methods.

How to choose each method? You can choose according to the differences in research methods, the product's life cycle, and actual time, energy, and funding.

Differences in research methods

Quantitative and qualitative are relative concepts. Quantitative methods focus on understanding "what", that is, discovering what users do and digging out factual information. Qualitative methods focus on understanding "why", that is, digging out the reasons behind user behavior and understanding the phenomenon.

Research methods corresponding to product life cycle

• Infancy: During this period, the product has not yet been finalized and the target users are still exploring the market. You can try to find expert users or users of competing products through interviews, focusing on exploring the scenarios in which they use the product and their core pain points, so as to verify the MVP version.
• Growth stage: At this stage, the product has entered a period of rapid user growth. As the scale increases, users will be stratified and more and more problems will be exposed. You can try to stratify users through quantitative methods, and then assist with qualitative understanding of each type of user and solve problems in a targeted manner.
• Mature stage: The user base tends to be stable. On the one hand, the product needs to maintain stability, continue to meet the needs of existing users, and improve the product experience; on the other hand, it needs to try to break through and find market segments to tap new growth points. You can try to first qualitatively explore the blue ocean, and then quantitatively verify it.
• Decline stage: Qualitatively understand the reasons and adjust products.

Taking the KuaiDa intelligent design business line as an example, we took into account factors such as purpose, product cycle, research method, time and energy, and adopted a combination of data + questionnaire + telephone interview methods.

Step 3: Plan and collect data

After clarifying the goals and methods, the entire research needs to be refined, a specific and detailed implementation plan needs to be developed and implemented, and the overall pace needs to be controlled to collect effective information.

For example, if the questionnaire method is used, it is necessary to design the questionnaire, select the interviewees, distribute the questionnaire, and collect the questionnaire. If the interview method is used, it is necessary to prepare relevant materials before, during, and after the interview. Different methods require different precautions in the implementation process. You can refer to the reference books and articles on the relevant methods, which will not be repeated here.

Step 4: Analyze data and cluster roles

After collecting and organizing valid information in the third step, it is necessary to identify key behavioral variables, match the surveyed users with the behavioral variables one by one, and identify differentiated behavioral patterns.

When looking for variables that may lead to behavioral differences between users, the author has summarized some dimensions for reference based on past experience.

When mapping users based on behavioral variables, it is not necessary to pursue absolute accuracy, as long as the mapping is relatively clear. After sorting out, it can be observed that some user groups are concentrated on several behavioral variables, which form a significant behavioral pattern, thereby clustering a certain role type. By analogy, several different behavioral patterns can be found. To ensure comprehensiveness, it is best to traverse after mapping to check whether there are any missing users or variables.

Taking KuaiDa as an example, when users use intelligent design tools, their behavioral variables can be subdivided into: occupation type, professional skill level, usage method, factors they value, etc. After corresponding one by one, they are clustered into several major role types. For example, one type pursues speed and pays attention to the overall effect; the other type focuses on the process and pays attention to details.

In addition to the above methods, for enterprise-level products of the to B type, when the user's functional attributes are very strong, the enterprise function can be used as the basis for dividing the role types. At this time, it is only necessary to sample typical samples for each type of role, ensure completeness, and conduct research.

Step 5: Comprehensive features and output portrait

After completing the role clustering, we sorted out the dimensional characteristics of each role, such as behavior, goals, pain points, etc., to form the basic framework of the portrait, and gave a detailed description of each role's attribute information, scenarios, etc. to make the portrait more full and realistic.

At this time, please note:

• Although there are many portrait templates available online, they are only for reference. You need to create your own business portrait based on the information you have collected.
• It is best to attach a photo that matches the character's characteristics and the environment to each portrait, so as to convey a more emotional message and create a stronger sense of immersion.
• Establish the priority of the portrait. According to Alan Cooper's suggestion, a product should not have more than 3 user roles. After the portrait is obtained, it is necessary to evaluate the importance of the portrait based on the size of the population base, profit potential, competitive advantage, business planning and other dimensions, and define the main role, secondary role, supplementary role, etc.
• As a design tool, user portrait is not static and needs to be continuously iterated over time. When the product has accumulated a certain number of users, quantitative methods can be used to verify it and supplement and optimize more dimensional information.

User portrait framework

Taking Kuaida as an example, the portrait of a certain role - a sales guide is as follows:

Step 6: Combine products and implement portraits

The value of user portraits can only be reflected if they are implemented and help product design; otherwise, they are just castles in the air.

After creating the portrait, you can organize and share the portrait results so that team members can reach a consensus on the users they serve, and then discuss new opportunities or improvements for the product, and gradually implement them in product design and promotion and marketing. How to apply user portraits before, during, and after design will be further explained in subsequent articles, so this article will not go into details.

Summarize

This article introduces the concept, value and construction process of user portraits. As the saying goes, practice makes perfect, and you can try it out in your daily work. At present, Kujiale is gradually building a complete user portrait covering the entire company and various business lines from 0 to 1. We will continue to explore and improve the portrait construction method in this process.