Week 10: Challenge Activity - User Persona & Stories
This week we take a look at User Personas and User Stories, a common practice when designing a human centred product or service.
“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.” (Friis Dam, R and Yu Siang, T. 2021).
This is quite a familiar process to me as we often created these in my role as a fashion designer. Following the creation of a seasonal concept and any research trips had been undertaken, we would create user personas. Of course, we would design large ranges of products and so the user persona would not be expected to purchase all of the styles. This would just be a broad persona that not only could be an existing patron of the brand, but would also align with the aesthetics and direction of the concept.
There was a period in my previous role where the brand was being bought out by a new investor due to poor sales and a declining interest in the brand. At this point, we bought in an external body to conduct some brand styling exercises to define our customer; their goals in life, what made them happy or frustrated, what form of transport they took to work, what they did in their free time.
When designers are continually looking outwards towards other brands or levels of the fashion retail landscape, it is understandable from that they may forget their true target audience from time to time. We may even aspire to be attractive to a different audience, one that seems more desirable, however without due care, this can cause the designer (and brand) to lose focus and appeal to the customer who actually is buying into you.
Brand styling and user persona/story exercises really allow us as designers to refocus and remember our audience, and subsequently to design with them in mind.
A case study by Jana Bihanova in 2019 suggests that carrying out user research and building user personas is an effective way for a brand to attract the audience it is intended for. User research for a luxury fashion brand gave some insights into what aspects were attractive to the customer, as well as those that they disliked. Through a simple questionnaire that highlighted demographics, purchase behaviour motivations and concerns, it was easy to create two user personas that would form the basis of planning the user journey. (Bihanova, 2019).
It is possible to carry out qualitative and quantitative research in the pursuit of understanding user trends, though the data collected from qualitative research lends itself much better to the task of identifying the characteristics for a user persona. “Personas derived using qualitative research had the advantage that they were specific and precise (Sinha, 2003).”
Sinha argues that “personas based on qualitative research had several shortcomings. Firstly, designers had to classify users and develop personas by their subjective judgements. The resulting persona could vary greatly depending on the designer's prior knowledge and experience about the users” (Sinha, 2003)
User Persona for &baby
As part of this weeks challenge we have been asked to create a single user persona for one of the previous rapid ideation tasks. I decided to work with &baby, from our first ideation challenge. I feel closer to this app as it is more in the online retail / fashion world, and so I can draw upon my previous experience in User Persona creation.
References
BIHANOVA, J. 2019. ‘Case Study: User Personas building for a luxury clothing company’ [online] Accessed 19th August. <https://scandiweb.com/blog/case-study-user-personas-building-for-a-luxury-clothing-company/>
FRIIS DAM, R and YU SIANG, T. 2021. ‘Personas – A Simple Introduction’ [online] Accessed 19th August. <https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them>
SINHA, R. 2003. ‘Persona development for information-rich domains’ CHI'03 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM(2003), pp. 830-831.