20
votes
How do you build empathy for users that you don't relate to?
Understanding and sharing your users thoughts and pain points
Become an advocate! Key in this area is conducting frequent usability testing and inviting both users and business stakeholders to ...
- 6,976
10
votes
Are personas actually useful?
Personas are both good and not good.
A few reasons why they are not good - from personal experience:
They represent research at a point in time and may become less valid as time goes by, and sadly ...
- 70.7k
9
votes
Product Manager against personas
This is quite common, tell your Manager that you will develop a set of personas with the help of the team. And no target audience will be missed from the set of personas.
Tell him that the procedure ...
- 184
7
votes
How do you determine an appropriate number of personas?
This phrase occurs again and again in UX: "It depends"
It's really dependant on the number of personality facets you need to align to and the depth you want your service to appeal to.
You don't need ...
- 13.4k
6
votes
Accepted
Should persona be written at an epic, theme or story level?
I don't think there's a set answer as to how much detail is necessary within a persona. The development teams and Business Analysts I'm used to working with deals with persona as the basis of the ...
- 8,481
6
votes
What's the difference between User profiles and Personas?
This is a good question as you will find people have mixed responses about this.
The way I have viewed this and multiple agencies and companies I have worked at also view this is: User profiling is a ...
- 243
5
votes
Accepted
Why create fictive personas if a real person makes a perfect archetype?
I think this is primarily a question of ethics. Please note - I am not questioning your ethics by any means, these are just general thoughts on the ethical side of user research and persona creation.
...
- 699
5
votes
Accepted
Female only persona
What you have now is a clear statistical evidence that shows most of your audience is female, and that you should take special care about that evidence.
Statistical evidence also shows that AT LEAST ...
- 32.7k
5
votes
How to best group interview subjects into “roles” for persona creation?
Interview / observe them, understand their behavior, then slowly uncover the commonalities. Use those to start uncovering their roles / groupings. Roles become apparent after the analysis of the data, ...
- 5,008
5
votes
Accepted
How do you build personas based on real users
I create user personas mainly using user interviews and contextual inquiries. If available, I will also use data from the analytics software to support my findings during the interviews.
The way I ...
- 873
4
votes
Differences between Personas and Archetypes?
I think the distinction is important otherwise we're not leveraging the full potential of each method and how it fits into the overall research and design process. I agree with nearly all the great ...
- 41
4
votes
How do you determine an appropriate number of personas?
Just get started
Nothing is constant in the market: Your personas will change over time.
The key is to start putting personas to work in your product now, knowing that you'll have another group to ...
- 21.1k
4
votes
Leaders questioning how many of each persona there are
Your leadership is technically in the right. You cannot have more than one primary persona. It sounds like you have split your personas too readily. If you find that two personas seem to vary only ...
- 9,421
4
votes
Radio buttons on mobile?
Radio buttons may not be 'sexy', but they get the job done with no room for user-interpretation. If you have a choice between 2-3 options, then radio buttons are ideal. They ensure that a user sees ...
- 9,421
3
votes
Product Manager against personas
The crux of the matter is UX should always understand who the user is in order to design the best experience. In days past we used to cling onto personas to give us this foundation, however over the ...
- 31
3
votes
How do you build empathy for users that you don't relate to?
I've found cultivating empathy to be one of the most challenging things in life. When faced with emotional criticism, provocations, or outright hostility, the expectations are that your response will ...
- 672
3
votes
Guidelines for identifying "power users"?
You are approaching the problem from the wrong side. If you try to find out which users can be stuck into a labelled category, you end up with categories mostly useless for UX.
The right thing to do ...
- 6,223
3
votes
Writing persona narratives - about existing scenario vs envisioned end scenario
Use both, but in order
Personas are intended to provide a model for user behavior. This may include needs, emotions, perceptions, incentives, and goals.
Personas are intended to help designers ...
- 40.4k
3
votes
Why create fictive personas if a real person makes a perfect archetype?
As @Andy writes, you run the risk of invalidating your research (or worse) by not adhering to best practices re: confidentiality.
The other problem I see is that your example real user may be too ...
- 1,455
3
votes
The Personal in Personas
I compare UX professionals to actors. Actors use routines helping them to impersonate their characters. These routines go extensively into the character's background, environment, behavior in ...
- 1,175
3
votes
Can I use 2 different User Journeys for the same Persona to show the flow of 2 different tasks that the user performs?
You user is functioning under two separate personas and each persona has a journey. When they switch persona, the journey switches as well. The challenge is designing the functionality. Ideally, each ...
- 131
3
votes
How to start with personas for internal use
When introducing user research to an internal organization you should be precise at how you will output your research to the team, so that it can be fully understood and thoroughly discussed.
In my ...
- 161
3
votes
Is it necessary to have male and female personas?
I'm not sure that I would advocate covering every demographic with personae.
You seem to say that your company wants to expand their female user-base but that isn't a company target.
Firstly, I ...
- 13.4k
3
votes
How to best group interview subjects into “roles” for persona creation?
The Interview should be focused around deducting what roles the subjects fit into, rather than predefining it. However, if the is distinction in terms of the roles is important, you could screen the ...
- 51
3
votes
What is the difference between Proto-personas, Data-driven, Lean Persona and Ad hoc Personas?
I don't think there is an exact definition, but each of the instances or types you mentioned (keeping in mind that they come from different combinations of sources) relate to some characteristic or ...
- 25.4k
3
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between Proto-personas, Data-driven, Lean Persona and Ad hoc Personas?
I agree that all the different names are confusing! The good news is that there are basically only 2 types of persona:
Data-driven
Proto/Ad hoc/Lean
The difference is to do with how the personas are ...
- 46
3
votes
How do you uncover true motivations and goals during user research?
I think there's something here to be said for not asking 'why' and trying to understand their true rationale deeper. In a workplace context their entire rationale possible is that, and knowing why won'...
- 31
2
votes
Personas without made up stuff?
The best way to do this would be to go out into the field, to watch your target audience in their own environment and to interview them about their current behavior and what they think their future ...
- 204
2
votes
Differences between Personas and Archetypes?
I don't agree with these categories.
Maybe the archetypes could be replaced by Personas vs Protopersonas, or stereotypes.
Archetypes based on Carl Gustav Jung's theory are collective unconscious ...
- 844
2
votes
Grouping participants in a card sort analysis?
The question is valid, but it has somewhat of a 'backwards' scent.
Normally, you conduct a research (eg, card sorting) with some research goal in mind. The goal will account for the various personas. ...
- 32.1k
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