Creating Personas for UX Design Projects
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Published on January 29, 2015
An important part of the UX design process involves understanding your users and what motivates them. One way to achieve this is by creating personas to represent the users you are serving with your app or website. Creating personas as part of your UX design process ensures you are designing for actual users.
Creating UX Personas
The idea behind creating a UX persona is to identify your potential user as a part of your user experience planning. Personas can be detailed, with consideration for the demographics of your audience, such as their age, gender, job status, salary, and educational level. When creating a persona you can even assign a name or a photograph to represent them.
End Goal for User Personas
Deciding the persona’s goals are when using the app or website you created is an important next-step. For example, if you are creating an app for productivity in a home office, determine what level of adaptation your persona has for using your app. Your persona may be interested in time saving techniques, or they may be more interested and likely to use apps relating to a specific area of concentration that aligns to their interest.
Importance of User Experience Personas
Users are the main focus of any UX project. Creating personas to represent your users is an important use of your time, allowing you to understand the people for whom you are creating your website or app. This makes certain that time in the development processes is focused on creating features and functions that are useful and apply to the needs of your audience. UX personas steer you in the right direction from the start of your project.
Take a User Experience Course
If you are interested in learning more about how to develop UX personas, consider the user experience courses at American Graphics Institute. In these courses, discover how to transform your work by using personas to represent the users for your applications. Additionally, you'll gain tips on creating persona groups that allow you to operate on a larger scale when developing with UX personas in mind.
About the author
Jennifer Smith is a user experience designer, Photoshop expert, educator and author based in Boston. She is the author of more than 20 books on design tools and processes, including Adobe Creative Cloud for Dummies, Adobe Creative Cloud Digital Classroom, and Photoshop Digital Classroom. She has been awarded a Microsoft MVP three times for her work with user experience design in creating apps for touch, desktop, and mobile devices.
Jennifer delivers UX training and UX consulting for large Fortune 100 companies, small start-ups, and independent software vendors. She has been hired by Adobe and Microsoft to deliver training workshops to their staff, and has traveled to Asia, Europe, India, the Middle East, and across the U.S. to deliver courses and assist on UX design projects. She has extensive knowledge of modern Windows UX Design, having worked closely with the Windows team to create educational material and deliver UX workshops to key partners globally on behalf of Microsoft. Jennifer works with a wide range of prototyping tools including Fireworks, Photoshop, Illustrator, Blend for Visual Studio, and Balsamiq. She also works extensively in the fields of presentation design and visual design.
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