Personas for Makers

Improve your products through persona research.

Before you decide to make the next great app, you need to have a reason for building it. Your motivations for creating an app could be many, ranging from a personal learning experience to making something for the world at large. Here I would like to talk about building apps for other people to use. However, it helps keeping in mind personas when making anything, since there’s always the possibility that what you create for yourself today might be the start of something big. The reasoning behind making something, whether we’re talking about writing a book, building a house, or making a computer program, is fundamental and the determining factor of its success or failure. Unfortunately, far too many apps get built without a clearly defined motivation or the needed background research. In other cases, it’s done insufficiently. How well-built your app is not what determines its success. What determines success is the need for people to use it. This is where a bit of persona research works miracles. Let’s dive right into personas for makers by talking about what they are, why we need them, and how they help you build more successful apps.

Personas overview

What are personas? They are archetypical representations of people you intend to interact with, your customers, or in the maker’s case, the people that will use the application you're making. You should focus on your largest user demographic.

How do they help makers? First, they help your product’s UX by putting you in the shoes of your intended user. This lets you spot UX mistakes before they even happen. Two very basic questions that you could face after developing personas for your product could be:

1. Is my product accessible to my intended users in terms of difficulty?

2. Does the language fit my ideal user persona? Would they understand it?

Simply put, the persona helps you identify who you are making your program for before setting off to make it. You will also spot design errors when applying the persona. By using personas, you reduce your chances of failure and you eliminate errors before you invest the time and resources into making them, giving you a much more fine-tuned product.

Is it time-consuming to make a persona?

Thanks to templates, persona research doesn’t have to be time-consuming. You can even do it off the top of your head or with some Google research. However, you should always consider the scope of your project. The bigger your project, the more in-depth persona research can become. You may even need to hire people to do persona research for you.

We use personas in real life

For example, when speaking to a child, we alter our language based on what we know of children, in order to make ourselves understandable to them. In all walks of life, we use personas based on what we know or assume about the person who we are talking to. When you create a digital product, you are talking to its users. Therefore, it makes sense to speak a language that they understand. And that’s exactly what a little of persona thought and/or research can do for your app.

Persona basics fields

Age range: early 20s, middle-aged, senior

Knowledge level: starting out, casual user, expert

Archetype/role: CEO, manager, customer

Location: the US, Asia, Africa,

Preferred language: English, Spanish, French

Goals: to learn how to use bitcoin wallets, pay bills with bitcoin, pay with lightning

Frustrations: technology, Fiat, privacy

These are just some of the very basic fields you can fill in about your users to form a persona. As you can see, we already notice how this sort of research makes apparent character archetypes when we choose from the examples above. A middle-aged CEO, who is a causal user from Asia, prefers English, wants to make payments with lightning, but is not tech-savvy… Now, how do we go about solving this person’s problems? How do we make an app that molds to this archetype’s needs and solve this market gap problem?

In your case, as a maker, you can start off by using a basic template such as this one, and you’ll be surprised at the results you come up with. You can change the headings around to better fit your needs by adding or removing some.

If befitting your needs, some other fields that you may add include are:

• family status

• gender

• education

• motivating factors

• income

• communication preference

• habits

There are many persona fields you can add beyond these listed here, all of which help you create a user archetype for your product. Everything depends on how deep you need to dive into the research. The most basic fields are the most fundamental and they usually include age range, role, goals, frustrations, and likes.

Conclusion

Researching personas and applying them when building your digital product gives you an added layer of protections against mistakes. They help you visualize how people will use your product and they eliminate mistakes and difficulties before they happen. If I can summarize personas in just a few words: Personas are the background research of your user base that you put into your product before building it, for better UX and overall product results through error prevention.