Persona — Application Development Approach

This article was written to help you with basic knowledge of Persona and as an individual review assignment of PPL CSUI 2021

the image is taken from justinmind

In Software Development, There are terms called User Interface(UI) and User Experience(UX). UI is all about how you create an interface that used by the user and the other one, UX is the experience that occurs when the user uses the application. These two terms have never even stopped since the application was released — even before it was released.

Then the question arises, how do developers work to overcome these two things?

There is a design guide created by a team of business and developers called Persona. The definition of a persona may vary. This time we will discuss Persona in Application Development.

Persona is a representation of the user of the application. Persona provides detailed information about who uses the application, what is their wants and needs, and their frustration or problem. This information helps in the design phase in software development so that developers can produce products that can satisfy users.

Now you already got the outline, let’s dive deeper.

persona creation

Persona is a result-summary of research on the user. The research aims to understand the user needs through interviews, surveys, and etc. The research could take a long time. In general, there are five steps in persona creation.

1. Data collecting. Do research on the user. Here you need to get the necessary data likes their pros & cons, like & dislike about the application and etc.
2. Data summary. Create a summary based on data that you collected. Most of the data collected are opinions. i.e you can start to classify each other based on their need.
3. Data Presentation. Create a presentation that describes the classified user. You also need to determine their Goals, Frustration, Motivation, and Prefer.
4. Verification and further analysis. Try to simulate their problem and do verification of all data that you got. If you find something that feels strange, do further research.
5. Finalization. Now you already got your persona data. Share the persona with your development and business member and make a discussion about it.

I think by following these five methods, at least the persona you create can be accounted for to use in your project.

Next, I want to show you how to use persona in your project using my project in Software Programming Course.

Persona in Project

In my project, my team's goal is to create a web application to help the Faculty of Economy and Business’s academic purposes. The application called Intern and Online Class Monitoring System.

The persona already created by our product owner. One of them is Staff Officer. Let’s called it Putra. Putra is responsible to assign lecturers to several interns' classes and examine students who take a thesis, which internship is a prerequisite.

Persona example of Staff Officer

After you read the frustration, want, and need section. You can easily determine what features that you need to implement in the application. In the case of Putra, we need to implement a feature to assign lecturers to certain internship classes. Also, we need to implement a feature to let Putra verify a student that meets the requirement to take the thesis.

Based on personas, my team was able to design a User Interface (UI) to meet the needs of the feature. Here are the results of the design that our team did to implement the feature.

prototype design of internship validation feature

prototype design of assign a lecturer feature

Let’s get to the QA section

so, do we really need to create persona ?

You’ve seen the process from the very beginning of how personas are created to being used in application development projects. See how much easier it would be if we created a persona first before designing our application. I would recommend you to create a Persona, again it is a framework to help you to design easier. It would give you more domain problem knowledge to understand the user needs.

then, do I only need to create persona only once?

It depends on your need. User is not a static variable, their needs and problems change every time. Since you need to adapt the application to user needs, understanding the user is the key. As long as this adaptation exists, it is best to create a persona so that we will have a better understanding of the needs. Of course, you don’t want to let the user get caught up in their problem, do you?

End Words

Thank you for your enthusiasm. I hope this article can enrich you about persona.

Reference

Buku Panduan UI UX PPL 2021

Referensi UI UX PPL 2021