UX Persona has an undisputed importance to creating rich user experiences and designing excellent services, but what are the exact benefits of creating personas? Apart from the fact that we use it with customer journey mapping to get to know our customers better. It turns out that personas are actually good for multiple reasons. Last time, we talked about the concept of persona and how you can create one. In this article, UXPressia looks at the top 3 wins you’ll get if you decide to create personas.
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It surely goes with no saying, but we'll keep saying it over and over: the main purpose of creating personas is to get the maximum customer exposure.
It’s no coincidence we’ve chosen the word “exposure”. Many businesses see customers as faceless mannequins with nothing more than a set of behaviors. Making personas is meant to tear down such attitude.
Personas show customers in a way that no other representation of user data can. When you describe personas’ goals, motivations and frustrations, when you see the flow of their day, you start to see how your product fits in their lives. How it makes them feel. You understand whether or not it helps them achieve their goals and become happier.
Persona engenders true interest and empathy toward customers among all of your team. No other tool does this. Empathy maps remain impersonal as they concentrate on what users feel/think and so on, but not on who these users are. User stories tell stories (surprise), reveal goals and brief users’ background, but they are not detailed enough to evoke empathy. And without empathy, there’s no good UX.
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Just like English is a lingua franca in our world, a persona is a universal language in the world of UX. It enables your team to speak the same language and it’s huge. It’s huge because it:
The list of persona benefits doesn’t come to these points. You’ll start noticing more and more wins along the way.
It’s been proven that speaking a particular language forms the way you see reality. Speaking the Persona language makes your company truly customer-centered. All that makes Persona a highly desired guest in your organization.
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Lastly, but not leastly, creating personas enables you to focus and design products for a set of specific users and that leads you toward making better design decisions.
When you know the end-user inside out with all his or her goals and expectations, you implement the right features that really give people what they want. This targeting prevents you from wasting time on something not worth working on.
Hitting the right spots is what makes a good user experience. In the end, you have fewer support costs and less user-facing documentation. Even fewer bugs!
So these were our 3 killer wins of creating personas. Print this out, show it your decision makers and invite personas into your company!
But don’t forget that UXPressia now offers a mega-tool for making incredibly detailed personas. Over 20 sections from demographic data up to brand influence and persona skills. Creating, sharing and collaborating online from anywhere, exporting and printing your personas – it’s all about UXPressia Persona Online. Stop reading this already, go check it out and tell about it to everyone!