Persona: A Real Fictional Character.

3 min readMar 25, 2021

Many people say that consuming too much fiction makes us forget about reality. Everything that happens in fiction is impossible to happen. People are usually dissatisfied with reality, so that’s why they consume fiction. But for me, fiction isn’t that bad. Isn’t it?

Sometimes, fictions are better at giving moral values. The better the story, the easier it is at changing our way to see. Roughly, that’s the big picture of persona.

But, What Is Persona Actually?

Based on The Interaction Design website,

personas are fictional characters, which you create based upon your research in order to represent the different user types that might use your service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.

Personas are one of the most critical parts in making a product. Creating personas would help us to define the difference of our user’s target. Since we know that persona is a part of UX design, persona could generate empathy, which is essential to the UX design. Empathy allows us to look at our users’ personal representation and better understand their needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. As mentioned before, creating personas should be based on real users’ observations because personas would never be made out of our assumptions about our users.

Types of Personas

Goal-directed Personas, is a type of persona that focusses on what our user want to do with our product; what our users need to achieve their objectives.
Roles-based Personas, is a type of persona that also goal-directed personas with massively data-driven.
Engaging Personas, are designed to incorporate both purpose and role-driven character, as well as a more traditional, rounded personality.
Fictional Persona, are designed using the designer’s perspective without conducting any research like the other personas.

Creating Personas.

There are some steps to follow in creating personas.

Collecting Data. Collect as much knowledge about the users as possible. Perform high-quality user research of actual users in your target user group. In Design Thinking, the research phase is the first phase, also known as the Empathise phase. In some cases, you won’t have time or money for doing the interview, survey, etc. But don’t worry. It is still possible to create personas based on your stakeholder insight and competitor analysis. You can take a closer look at people’s interests in other products and how they interact with them.
Identifying and Analyzing Data. After we collect data, it’s time to identifying and analyzing the data. We should understand that different groups of people will also have a different approach. Try highlighting one similar metric between user personas to avoid comparing abstract things. Remember, different people have different goals, and so as problems and preferences.
Creating A Persona. A Persona consists of five main elements:

Photo.
Demography(name, status, and background).
Goals / Motivation, are what users want/expect when trying to achieve their goals.
Pain Points/Frustration, are the difficulties experienced by users when trying to achieve their goals.

What if our customer base is too diverse? We need to create more personas! With analyzing the data, you will definitely find your users based on grouping.

Here’s an example of our group project persona.