pragmatic personas - why?

pragmatic persona - why?

Pragmatic persona Putting a Face on your user needs


“You are Not Your User”

It’s easy to ask ourselves what we would like when making choices about features, but "Self-substitution" is the most common trap we fall into when making functionality and UI decisions.


Asking users what features they want and building them is also risky

This ends with users’ getting what they asked for and still not being satisfied with the site.


Usability

“The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a specified context of use.”


Ultimately, we should be making some good decisions about what software to build based on understanding what users really value.

That's where the idea of a persona comes in.


A persona is an example of a specific user that we can refer to when we evaluate decisions about functionality, navigation and design.


It's not based on one user, but a combination of information about many users. So, even though a persona may look like it’s describing a real person, that person is fictitious.Having this fictitious person helps us not get hung up on any single user's opinions.


It's a neutral "design target"—the person we're trying to satisfy. The hope is that making this persona happy will result in making all people like the persona happy.


Avoids subjective design decisions, and allows us to judge effectiveness based on how well the interface supports the users behaviour and goals


Why do we encourage the whole team and all stakeholders to be involved?

With a shared of understanding of who we’re designing for and their needs, we can build a more effective tool.

pragmatic personas - why?

Design