{"id":1745,"date":"2021-01-25T10:59:17","date_gmt":"2021-01-25T09:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/?p=1745"},"modified":"2023-11-13T15:26:58","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T14:26:58","slug":"advanced-user-persona-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/advanced-user-persona-design","title":{"rendered":"Expert Tips for User Persona Design"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>User persona design has long been a constant in product development to help development teams empathize with users. Understanding users&#8217; needs wants and journeys is key to creating great products, but it can also be the hardest part. <br><br><a href=\"https:\/\/www.agilealliance.org\/glossary\/team\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.agilealliance.org\/glossary\/team\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Agile teams<\/a> can easily lose focus on user journeys and tend to focus on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.easyagile.com\/blog\/user-story-points\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.easyagile.com\/blog\/user-story-points\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">story points<\/a>. This is when the role of the <a href=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/remote-product-manager\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/remote-product-manager\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Product Manager<\/a> becomes really important, it is their job to ensure that a user-centric approach is maintained by using user personas to map user stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the literature on user persona design, you will often only find basic templates and clich\u00e9s. So where can you look for more advanced techniques?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>UI\/UX Designers are usually experts in the subject, so it\u2019s worth turning to them for ideas. This is also what we did for this blog post. Here\u2019s what we\u2019ve found out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-is-layout-9d6595d7 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\" style=\"flex-basis:100%\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-rank-math-toc-block has-base-background-color has-background\" id=\"rank-math-toc\"><h2>Contents<\/h2><nav><div><div><a href=\"#types-of-user-personas-in-story-mapping\">Types of User Personas in Story Mapping<\/a><\/div><div><a href=\"#expert-tips-from-ui-ux-designers\">Expert Tips from UI\/UX Designers\u00a0<\/a><\/div><div><a href=\"#how-to-build-user-personas-in-stories-on-board-that-will-help-you-to-create-a-great-product\">How To Build User Personas in StoriesOnBoard that will help you to Create a Great Product?<\/a><\/div><\/div><\/nav><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"types-of-user-personas-in-story-mapping\">Types of User Personas in Story Mapping<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>Not all user personas are created in the same way. UI\/UX designers identify 4 different types based on the purpose and the amount of previous research done. None is the ultimate target type, but all may be needed at different stages of product development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Goal-directed Personas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>The descriptions of goal-oriented user personas are extremely to the point. They answer one simple question: <strong>what does the user want to achieve with this product?<\/strong> Goal-oriented personas are usually short descriptions that rely mainly on facts.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>This type is recommended if you have done a lot of research on your users and know them very well. This type does not generate empathy on its own, so teams that can fill in the blanks will benefit the most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Role-based Personas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Role-based personas are <strong>based on the role that a particular<\/strong> <strong>user plays within the organization<\/strong>. For example, leaders and managers will use tools differently than, say, the development team. Therefore they usually need a different user persona.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Engaging Personas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>By using the best of both approaches above, you can design user personas truly engaging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The aim is to create a persona that is<strong> very real to the whole team<\/strong> so that as many of them as possible can relate to it. Engaging personas need to be created with the user&#8217;s emotions and psychology in mind, and you also need to know something about their background to understand their goals more deeply. Engaging personas are most helpful in evoking empathy,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Fictional Personas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Fictitious personas are based on assumptions about users&#8217; past experiences. When a design team hypothesizes what a particular persona may or may not want to achieve, they are called fictional personas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Remember that <strong>these types of personas<\/strong> <strong>can be very misleading<\/strong> and should always be carefully researched before using them in user story maps. As <a href=\"https:\/\/www.jpattonassociates.com\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/www.jpattonassociates.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Jeff Patton<\/a> points out, <strong>&#8220;You are not your user&#8221;.<\/strong> Let&#8217;s not fall into the trap of self-replacement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"expert-tips-from-ui-ux-designers\">Expert Tips from UI\/UX Designers&nbsp;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile\" style=\"grid-template-columns:34% auto\"><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design5-1.png\" alt=\"user persona example\" class=\"wp-image-3881 size-full\" title=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design5-1.png 300w, https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design5-1-150x150.png 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/figure><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"block-bf22d178-881f-4a46-9bad-35fbf6861cb1\">Don\u2019t Just Ask Users What They Want &#8211; Rely on Data to Design User Personas<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>A good persona is built from sound data, not from mindless brainstorming. Many development teams make the mistake of asking users what features they want to see in a product and simply following their wishes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Where does it lead?&nbsp;<\/em><br><br>Without a clear understanding of your users, you\u2019ll likely <strong>find yourself in a feature competition<\/strong> and lose (or never reach) your competitive advantage. Users are not experts in UX research and often do not see the big picture.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Through the user persona design process, be sure to rely on data and try to eliminate the guesswork as much as possible.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\">\n<p><strong>What Can be Considered as Research?&nbsp;<br><\/strong>Research does not have to be super-scientific. Talking to users and observing how they use the product is already very valuable research. Make sure that you always include user observation in the research phase, or it is best to do it continuously.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>User persona research and user persona design should always precede user story mapping. Vague statements should follow careful research, not precede them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How Many User Personas Should We Have on a Story Map?<\/h3>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image is-style-rounded\">\n<figure class=\"alignleft size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"256\" src=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design4-1.png\" alt=\"user journey user persona\" class=\"wp-image-3882\" title=\"\"><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/prioritization.html\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/prioritization.html\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Prioritization<\/a><strong> <\/strong>is also king when it comes to the number of user personas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>You need to have a fixed number in mind when deciding on how many personas you\u2019ll want to build for a single-user story map. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><br><br><br>After brainstorming all the user persona types that use your product, r<strong>ank them from most to least critical<\/strong>. Each persona should have a good reason why it should be included, if it doesn&#8217;t influence the final design, leave it out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>A typical software product will have between 3 to 10 personas<\/strong>, a good story map should have fewer than that. However, when mapping user stories, <strong>you must always focus on a single user persona <\/strong>otherwise you will want to meet all the requirements of all personas, which is impossible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">How Does User Persona Design Help with Prioritization and Release Planning?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Give the best possible experience to your user persona design in focus. Especially, <strong>when you\u2019re building an MVP, you don\u2019t have the luxury of including all possible users<\/strong>. As we\u2019ve mentioned before, prioritization is king. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Walking through each user persona on the story map and identifying individual user stories and gaps in the story map is key. Still, you\u2019ll have to be able to prioritize user stories that will need to be included in the MVP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">What Happens When Your Personas are Organizations?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Organizational profiles can also work as personas. Jeff Patton calls these \u201corgzonas\u201d. These personas tend to be much <strong>more \u201cfact-heavy\u201d and have fewer fictional elements<\/strong>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Research is more complex because the users and the decision-makers are not the same people. Even if you design the product with the user in mind, you need to take other stakeholders into account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Find the Balance Between Facts and Fiction<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<p>Fictional details can be very helpful, but if you overdo them, it\u2019ll lead to fictional personas. Rely on facts of thorough persona research and <strong>only fill in the \u2018blanks\u2019 with fiction such as likes and dislikes, and hobbies of a character. <\/strong>These small details will help your team put themselves in the persona\u2019s shoes, but won\u2019t lead them to false conclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"how-to-build-user-personas-in-stories-on-board-that-will-help-you-to-create-a-great-product\">How To Build User Personas in <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.storiesonboard.com\/en\/articles\/1709292-personas-in-storiesonboard\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">StoriesOnBoard<\/a> that will help you to Create a Great Product?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text alignwide is-stacked-on-mobile\"><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"485\" src=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design3-1.png\" alt=\"How To Build User Personas in StoriesOnBoard\" class=\"wp-image-3884 size-full\" title=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design3-1.png 300w, https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design3-1-186x300.png 186w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/figure><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p>StoriesOnBoard supports <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stickyminds.com\/article\/how-pragmatic-personas-help-you-understand-your-end-user\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the pragmatic <\/a>user persona design approach used by most agile teams. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For all types of user personas identified as critical, pick a custom icon that best describes them and <a href=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/what-is-on-a-user-persona-card\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/what-is-on-a-user-persona-card\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">fill in their profiles<\/a>. You can create persona groups based on job roles, archetypes, etc.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In the <a href=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\" target=\"_blank\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">StoriesOnBoard app<\/a>, you can <strong>add personas to epics and individual story cards to<\/strong> map user journeys and potentially identify gaps in user stories more easily.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-media-text alignwide has-media-on-the-right is-stacked-on-mobile\"><div class=\"wp-block-media-text__content\">\n<p class=\"has-text-color\" style=\"color:#546391\"><strong>StoriesOnBoard Tip: One Persona per User Journey <\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-color\" style=\"color:#546391\"><em>Assigning a new persona to every different user journey can be a good idea if you have multiple user journeys such as \u201cimpulse shopper\u201d, \u201cresearcher\u201d, \u201cdiscount chaser\u201d, \u201cfashionable diva\u201d or \u201clast minute shopper\u201d. This way you\u2019ll use personas to map individual user journeys on your user story map. Identifying user journeys becomes significantly easier if you can filter them by personas.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div><figure class=\"wp-block-media-text__media\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"333\" src=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design2-1.png\" alt=\"user persona design filtering\" class=\"wp-image-3885 size-full\" title=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design2-1.png 300w, https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/user-persona-design2-1-270x300.png 270w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Agile teams can easily loose focus on user journeys and tend to fixate on storypoints. This is when the role of the Product Owner becomes critical who can help to keep a user-centric approach, using user personas in story mapping.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":3886,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[316,7],"tags":[949,979],"class_list":["post-1745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-product-design","category-story-mapping","tag-personas","tag-user-personas","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1745"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5546,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1745\/revisions\/5546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storiesonboard.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}