What is User Persona? How to Create User Persona to Your Website Project?

What is User Persona?

Have you heard the word "persona"? If you browse it from Cambridge English Dictionary, persona is the particular type of character that a person seems to have and that is often different from their real or private character. From that, we can assume that user persona is a collection of semi-fictional characters of our target customers. So, it means that we should create our fictional user or visitor characters before building our website. By creating user persona, we will have a right picture of how we design our website to fit our user needs.

"Personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way. Creating personas will help you to understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals. Creating personas can help you step out of yourself. It can help you to recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you to identify with the user you’re designing for."

-Interaction Design Foundation

Elements of Persona

Based from an article uploaded on FORUME ONE, there are 9 elements of persona. Off course, we could add more or less elements, it depends on our needs. The 9 elements of user persona are listed below:

1. Personal Information: This is basic background information about your audience. The information that we like to collect includes: name, gender, age, occupation/company, location, photo
2. Description: A short explanation of who the audience is, what they do, and what their main focus is.
3. Motivation: A brief explanation of what’s driving the audience’s actions and choices.
4. Main Quote: A compelling quote that summarizes what this person’s immediate needs or perspective is.
5. Goals: The top three to five things that this audience needs to accomplish. These are the high-level goals that they have: to view, find, compare, choose, promote, sign up, identify, donate, purchase, review, etc.
6. Concerns: The top three to five worries that this audience has. These are the potential issues that could impact their success.
7. Primary Needs: The top three to five needs that this audience has. These are the necessary things they must have in order to complete their goals: “I need to have access to XYZ. I need to have this information on XYZ. I need to be able to do XYZ.”
8. Feelings: The emotions you want your audience to feel about your organization or the tasks they have to do with your organization. 
9. Additional Quotes: Ideally these are quotes that we can pull from our audience research, especially interviews. These quotes may answer questions such as what does your audience want, questions they have, or any opinions they may have about your organization/website, etc.

Implementation Example

To illustrate this, let's see one of my website project called Sistem Informasi Penilaian dan Evaluasi Praktikum, a website to help FISIP (Faculty of Social and Political Sciences) UI's students and lecturers to submit and score the practical work's (internship) reports. This project is being developed by my team, MK-PPL.

Define Types of Users

First, my team specifies what types of users are using this website. After doing some careful research and with a some help from our product owner, we get 5 main types of users that will use this website. They are:

1. Administrator: a user that can control user registration and access control.
2. College Coordinator: a user that can monitor all reports submitted by students and as a decision maker of this lecture.
3. School Supervisor: a user that can monitor and give score for reports submitted by students that is his/her responsibility.
4. Organization Supervisor: a user that can give score for reports submitted by students that are undergoing a practical work (internship) in his/her organization.
5. Students: a user that can submit his/her reports and give feedback to organization and see his/her report scores.

Create User Persona

After defining types of users, we create user persona for each type of user, complete with the 9 elements. Based on the team needs, we decided to create user persona with elements: personal information, quote, wants and needs, frustrations, and story. Below, there are a list of images that contain user persona:

Administrator

College Coordinator

School Supervisor

Organization Supervisor

Students

List All Features Needed and Design Styles That Will Match

After that, the last thing we do is to list all features needed and design styles will match to all users. We make conclusion from each user persona, which is listed below:

1. Administrator: From her wants and needs, we can conclude that we need at least 3 pages for administrator: user access control page, users list page, and user registration page. From the story, we know that she is a staff in UI, so we will prepare a SSO UI log in feature (a CAS log in system for UI employees and students) for administrator. From her quote, we should ensure that users can do their task with less click because the administrator love the effectiveness.
2. College Coordinator: From his wants and needs, we can conclude that we need at least 4 pages for college coordinator: organizations list page, organization data input page, students list page, and report submissions dashboard page. From the story, we know that he is a lecturer in UI, so we will prepare a SSO UI log in feature (a CAS log in system for UI employees and students) for college coordinator. From his quote, we can infer that he really interested in data. So, we will add some analytical histograms or charts to his dashboard.
3. School Supervisor: From his wants and needs, we can conclude that we need at least 3 pages for school supervisor: student report history page, scoring page, and report submission creation page. From the story, we know that he is a lecturer in UI, so we will prepare a SSO UI log in feature (a CAS log in system for UI employees and students) for school supervisor. From his quote, we can guess that he loves transparency and on time, so we should ensure that all submissions will be marked as late if submitted after deadline and ensure that all students can see their scores for each submission transparently.
4. Organization Supervisor: From her wants and needs, we can conclude that we need at least 3 pages for organization supervisor: students list page, scoring page, and organization profile page. From the story, we know that she is not working in UI, neither studying in UI, so we will prepare a manual log in feature exclusively for organization supervisor. From her quote, we can guess that he loves transparency and feedback, so we should ensure that all submissions will be marked as late if submitted after deadline and ensure that we create a page for students to give feedback.
5. Students: From her wants and needs, we can conclude that we need at least 4 pages for students: report submission page, reports list page, feedback form page for school supervisor, and feedback form page for organization supervisor. From the story, we know that she is a student in UI, so we will prepare a SSO UI log in feature (a CAS log in system for UI employees and students) for student. From her quote, we should ensure that students can see their score and can get comments/reasons from someone who score their score because she love the openness and two-way communication.

That's all from me. I hope you will understand what user persona is and why we should create that. Have a good day!