When working on a fictional personal project that will only serve as a portfolio piece (i.e. briefbox projects), how can I find the appropriate data to create user personas? I want to emphasize my process but I feel that the lack of data and no client or real users are a major road block.
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5I reviewed so many portfolios of applicants. What often puts me off is not the design process or the lack of data, but the lack of purpose. I see empathy maps, personas etc. created for real or fictional projects, and then applicants fail to explain WHY they would use them in a project and what to learn from the artefacts. That turns an otherwise nice design process into something meaningless as they obviously didn't understand why they were doing this.– greenforestCommented Oct 12, 2018 at 19:51
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3 Answers
Just because the product is fake, it does not mean that the users must be fake also.
One useful tip that I received in this regard is to find a problem that you want to solve with your solution, create a proto persona (Although it will be sort of hard to do that alone. All stakeholders should participate in the proto persona creation), do some market research then validate the proto persona.
Although it may sound strange and even feel out of place, you have to talk to users. UX is not a sit-alone-in-your-cubicle-and-do-the-work-type-of-job. We have to talk to people all the time.
So go at it! I know you can do it!
answered Oct 19, 2020 at 12:59
I would suggest that persona's and empathy maps are MORE important than the final product at showing your process. That said, if its a fictional project for fake users, I see no problem with you inventing some attributes.
Look at it this way, you're getting an opportunity to really practice empathy based on your experience with a population. Alternately, you could make up a fictional project to address a problem that real people who you know (family, neighbors, friends, co-workers) experience and then talk to them about it.
Plus you're gaining a deeper experience into the actual design process. So you should be documenting this struggle and using to help tell your portfolio story.
If you have no interviews with users, you cannot make personas. At any time. Personas should never be based on anything else.
However, if you have some data, safe assumptions idea of user archetypes, you can make some proto personas instead.
https://uxplanet.org/persona-versus-proto-persona-9e26e831ed51
