Personas for experience design

This post is adapted from the Using audience personas to improve digital user experience strategy guide, on why traditional audience segments miss the mark and how psychographic personas can lead to success today.

While brand personas are defined by their general relationship to the topic or brand, design personas are defined by their usage of the interface, product, or service in question.

UX and service designers use personas as the target audience for their work, and all design decisions they make—no matter how large or small—will be seen through the lens of “where can we make this experience easier and more delightful for this persona?”

They’ll make sure each persona’s needs will be supported by features and that the “red routes” (or most common paths) through the experience are clear and relevant to them. Personas help the designers empathize with the personas. And it pays off—Forrester found that redesigns using personas are 4x more effective than redesigns without them.¹

A Forrester research study found that digital redesigns using personas provide a return up to four times more in KPIs than a digital redesign without them.

The process for building UX personas should include in-person sessions where users are observed engaging with the product or service directly. Seeing how each persona uses the interface differently will reveal volumes about their usage needs, frequently used features, red routes, and general relationship to the experience.

Ideally users are observed in context, with project team members shadowing users in “their natural habitat” in a real life scenario. When that’s not feasible, on-site sessions in a usability lab can be equally eye-opening.

	Karim	Tracy	Reed
Login frequency	High	Medium	Low
Tech savvy	8/10	4/10	6/10
Perspective	I believe in transparency between school, teachers, parents, and kids so everyone knows where the student stands.	The software doesn’t fit with how I evaluate students. I give feedback on assignments and it doesn’t fit well into this rigid framework.	I only need to communicate grades for the report card based on attendance. Everything else I don’t need in order to run my class smoothly.
Evaluation style	Points, percentages, multiple choice, written tests	Qualitative feedback, freeform comments, holistic, subjective	Attendance, completion, effort
Login use cases	Homework and quiz updates, teacher feedback, Q&A, peer evaluation, end-of-year grades	Major assignments, teacher feedback, end-of-year grades	End-of-year grades
Feature needs	Quick batch import of assignment grades for entire class	Toolbar workspace interface for markup and feedback on student documents	Quicker, uncluttered navigational access
Common subjects	Classroom-based, STEM, traditional academic	Humanities, labs/practice-based studies, arts, music	Physical education, arts, music, practice-based studies, electives