Defining Personas
To us, it's persona[l]
Understanding and relating to what matters to your customers most is essential to product management. Inventive conducts ongoing research about target user segments and defines user personas so you can build an informed roadmap that will ensure the success of your product.
Our defining personas process helps to focus decisions surrounding product components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation. It’s also a quick and inexpensive way to test and prioritize those features throughout development. It also helps:
• Stakeholders and business leaders evaluate new product feature ideas
• Information architects develop informed wireframes, UI, and naming constructs
• Designers create the overall look and feel of the product
• System engineers and developers make decisions based on user data
• Copywriters create content for the appropriate audiences
The Inventive Persona Process
Inventive will work to define your personas at the beginning of your project. This is because personas can inform your product’s overall functionality, help uncover gaps, or highlight new opportunities.
The goal of personas is not to represent all audiences or address all needs of your product, but instead to focus on the major needs of the most important user groups.
To ensure your personas are accurate representations of your users, we will:
Conduct thorough user research: We will work to answer the following questions: Who are your users, and why are they using your product? What behaviors, assumptions, and expectations color their view of the product?
Condense the research: We will look for themes/characteristics that are specific, relevant, and universal to your product and its users.
Brainstorm: We will organize elements into persona groups representing your target users. We will also name or classify each group.
Refine: We will characterize, combine and prioritize the rough personas, separating them into primary, secondary, and, if necessary, complementary categories.
Make them realistic: We will develop the appropriate descriptions of each personas’ background, motivations, and expectations.
Elements of a persona
The personas we define for you will generally include the following key pieces of information:
Persona Group
Fictional Name
Job Title
...and major responsabilities.
Demographics
... such as age, education, ethnicity, and family status.
The goals
... and tasks they are trying to complete using your product
Environment
Their physical, social, and technological environment
Quote
A quote that sums up what matters most to the persona as it relates to your product
User Group
Casus pictures representing that user group
We will also make sure your personas’ information is organized in an easy-to-read, logical format.
“Personas are a crucial passage in the user-centered design process because they define expectations, concerns, and motivations, helping design teams to understand how to design a product that will satisfy user’s needs and therefore be a success.”
Defining Personas Success Stories
Personas improve user experience by taking common user needs and bringing them to the forefront of the planning stage — before design begins. We’ve helped clients from all business types and industries do just that. Here are just a few of our defining persona success stories.
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