Evaluating UX personas
What makes a persona valuable?
Personas are a visual and textual way to convey important information and data. When used in the design process, they are an essential way to define who the users are and what they want while uniting the project team and stakeholders in a common understanding.
But making valuable personas can be difficult. Many of the personas you encounter will be minutely specific, overly vague, or near completely useless to the product or domain you’re working with. Valuable personas are those that will continue to be useful to the team throughout the project and contribute to its success.
When evaluating personas to determine if they will be valuable to the project there are 3 important areas to consider:
- Purpose: Does the persona meet the business and domain needs by following conventions and standards?
- Design: Is the persona designed for optimal readability and usability?
- Content: Is the content of the persona relevant, accurate, and useful?
If the persona meets these criteria, it will likely be helpful to the project and meet the needs of the project team. If however these criteria are not met by the persona, you may need to consider taking another look at defining the users and anticipating how the persona will direct the project.
Let’s look at these criteria a little deeper…
1. Purpose
The purpose of a persona is to define a particular user who is representative of a larger user group or type. This user has a name, face, goals, and painpoints related to the product or service. The persona unites the project team and stakeholders in an understanding of the needs of the users and directs the team's decisions at various stages of the project.
The purpose is the first thing we look at when assessing personas since it is the highest level of understanding of the tool. If the purpose is unclear, the rest of the persona will be harder for the team to decipher and utilize effectively.
When assessing if a persona meets this purpose, there are a few questions you can ask yourself to ensure it is clear and complete:
- What business or domain is this persona for? How do you know?
- What type of information can be gained from this persona?
- Does this persona follow standard practices for content and design?
- Is there any information obviously missing?
- Is there any part of this persona that does not contribute to the purpose?
If the answer to any of these questions is ‘no’ or ‘I don’t know’ you may want to take a step back and determine if there is a way to get it to a yes. Just like other areas of UX, personas are iterative and you may not have everything 100% right on the first draft. By asking these questions, you can begin to uncover the possible gaps in the persona and address them.
2. Content
After meeting the purpose objectives for a persona, we can begin looking at the actual content — that is, all of the written and visual information conveyed and how it impacts our understanding of the persona.
There are four key content needs of a persona and each relates to a specific section: face, demographics, goals, and pain points. All other content should be relevant to the product or domain. Assessing this content means questioning if each of the key sections meets the needs of the team that make it actionable or relevant.
Ask yourself:
- Is demographic information relevant and useful?
- Is the bio short, succinct, and relevant to the business or service?
- Are goals actionable and specific?
- Are frustrations applicable to the product or user goals?
- Is the other information presented in a way that adds value?
3. Design
Once we have established a clear purpose in the persona and determined that the content is useful and successful, we can turn our attention to the design of the information. While the visual design may not seem like a make or break component, how information is presented can have a huge effect on how it is used.
The same principles that apply to interface design apply to the tools we use to build those interfaces. Accessibility, readability, usability, learnability, skimmable content, contrast, quality, and brand all play a role in the design of personas. Ensuring the persona is easy to use will mean broader applicability and a more successful team.
While you review the design of the persona, ask yourself:
- Is the persona easy to read? Is the text appropriately sized with high contrast?
- Is the persona well organized and conducive to skimming for information?
- Is the image large enough and is the subject’s face the focus?
- Does the persona make good use of color and brand?
- Is the information presented consistently and appropriatly?
Evaluate early and often
By evaluating your personas early and often, you can ensure that they convey the purpose, content, and design that will make them useful to you and your team throughout the project. Creating valuable personas isn’t easy. It takes time, user data, and most of all a clear understanding of what makes a persona work.
If you’re not sure how to start, try using this framework to evaluate other personas and get a feel for what works and doesn't work.
Building personas is not an exact science. Just like the rest of the UX process, it is best done iteratively, and the more often you practice building personas the easier it will become to define them in a way that is valuable to the project.
