User Experience Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for user experience researchers and experts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I have read in User Research that we need to define 1 primary persona for each User Interface. In other words, it is best if each UI aims at satisfying the needs of one of its personas as primary. On the other hand, personas have genders.
These facts seem to contravene with the need to design UIs that are suitable for both genders.
Please let me know what you think.
Straight on to your question, it's not mandatory to create personas from the gender if it's actually not making difference to the user base. Like, you are creating an app like ola/uber you have to take care of lady passengers on-boarded, we have to provide additional security features like SOS, tips, etc... Another way, if you creating an app for the food chain, it won't make more sense to create gender-based two different personas... I hope, I answered your question.
Based on my professional activity and what I learned in college you must do a research to gather data on potential users, after that you should group your users based on similarities and create user profiles. I would recommend that you create one persona for each profile.
The number of primary personas can also change if your service has different kind of users. For example if you are creating an app like Uber you would ideally have one persona for a driver and another for the passager.
What is the need of your audience? Is it gender specific or not? If you’re not designing for a gender-specific use case you are safe to just leave gender out of it altogether.
