Understanding User of your Application
Deliver an application with a perfect value for our users requires an interest and motivation understanding. Talking about the application, bring all users dream comes true by understanding all their needs is a good thing but never will be a good approach since we couldn’t ask each million users for their interest. But we could do sampling, so the idea is to find a perfect representation of a group instead of each customer to our goals. With hope, this group representation is able to cover a million users interest outside there. In the real-world, this approach what almost every team almost does in order to get a big picture of what a team is going to do, this gives a team a path, knows a boundary, and feels the shape of the application. The product of this approach is called persona, a persona is a way to tell you a big picture of your customer types by knowing their motivation, needs, the environment they stand on, and other characteristics that related to your desired application.
In this article, I really want to share with you the process of how we create our persona and successively affect our development.
Construct a Persona
Actually the idea is simple, knowing what they want is enough but remember is must relate to what your application main goal.
If it’s about a social application, then the proper user motivation that we want to hear such as “As a rich man, I want to donate my money for the one who needs it”, or “As a loner, I want to make friend with someone of one mind”, but not like “As an accountant, I want to be smarter than Einstein”. Something to be noted, knowing the motivation of a specific type of user can be shown in a percentage bar. For example, how much the motivation of the user to donate money to COVID-19 victims is about 95%, which means the user is so much sympathy enough to the victims, almost give their full time just only to help them.
We also need to know what they are lacking without the application and also their goals. Together it will make a great decision about what a team should do to solve their problems.
Their personality and their skills are also other important things that need to know, it really affects our UI/UX design team to design the UI by knowing this aspect. Without this, maybe we could randomly design as we want.
The last part and it has a lot telling you the type of user, namely bio. Bio will tell you who the user is, where the user comes from, what the user always do or what a position the user is. Our team found this information is helpful, together with goals we could create a flow of the application.
In the next section are our story and how do we construct the persona for us
A Little Story from Our Client
Definitely, in order to get the shape of our customer interest, we need to understand what our client really wants by sitting together. One of our clients is a doctor who is involved in the organization of tuberculosis that has a goal to eradicate tuberculosis in Depok. The organization also has something called officer, the one who gives a report of people who have symptoms of that disease. We found out that our client organization difficult to work without an application because it wastes a lot of time, energy, and money. Without application, they need to deliver their report to the doctor in handwritten, the problem appears due to the lack of officers have good writing. For a doctor, sometimes they found out difficult to understand what officers write or sometimes the report is damaged by rain or something. In the end, the doctor needs to call them to get a clear report or resend the report with proper writing. This is just a small problem, can you imagine how hard it is if the officer send a false report and needs to edit the report but the report is already on the way. Even though the obstacle is hard to pass, they still want to work to achieve their goal, that is spirit right. This is why we really want to value our clients and customers of their complaints by developing an application for them.
For technical, they told us that have no problem at all to operate a digital device such as a laptop or smartphone, we also realized their phone is mid-price, which means a laggy application is not really our priority to fix while developing the application since it’s rare to see a lag in a mid-price phone (fast enough), so we could focus to build what a feature they really want.
So here how do we construct that story into a persona
Persona Effect
It affects much on our development, especially for creating a flow feature and design our UI application. Every sprint planning, we always remember what our customer and client really want so we always pick a priority feature in order to achieve their goal. For the designer, it helps us to pick a color, create a shape of message that reflects their personality, also select a font it comes from the persona as well. More detail about UI/UX that reflects our persona will be in another blog, so stay tuned.
Takeaways
Creating personal is an extra effort, but it’s worth. Yes, you can create any application without a persona, but remember the main reason why we want to create an application is that what user wants, they are who will use the application. Without a good constraint and a knowledge of the user wants is like walking on the desert without a map, you only walk there but can’t tell which direction to get out of the desert and will take you more time than you could just use a map. Persona affects your application development such as feature creation and UI/UX design. So it’s not just a random user profile, it’s useful to get a big picture of what your application will do. I hope you get a sense of it and know better to understand more of your users.
