Persona: Fictional Character for your Product

Rabialco Argana

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4 min readApr 3, 2021

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What is Persona?

There are many ways to define persona such as:

A persona is a profile of a product’s typical customer.
Personas do not represent singular users but are representatives of a group of users that share similar behaviors, goals, and needs.
A persona is a way to model, summarize and communicate research about people who have been observed or researched in some way.
A persona is depicted as a specific person but is not a real individual, but it is synthesized from the observations of many people. Each persona represents a significant portion of people in the real world and enables the designer to focus on a manageable and memorable cast of characters.

Why do we need to make a persona?

Personas are being made to help in building empathy and understanding of the users you’re designing for. Personas are used to help the development team understand key traits, behaviors, goals, responsibilities, and needs of a specific type of user. The purpose of making a persona is to design an effective product based on what the user needs. The key benefits of persona are:

Explain the “why” behind product decisions
Focus on the needs of the most important from the user
Prioritize features that solve actual user problems
Implement new functionality in line with how customers will actually use it

How to create a persona?

Collecting and organize data/information: In this step, the purpose is to learn and collect real information about the user. There are many ways to collect the data such as interviews, surveys, web analytics, etc.
Analyze your data: In this step, the purpose is to identify the trend or pattern of the data that you've already collected in the first step. The purpose of this step is to understand who will use the product and learn from it. Therefore, you will understand your target users.
Create the persona: In this step, the purpose is to make the persona based on what you’ve already collected in the first and the second step. Attribute that needs to be defined in the persona is photo, name, description, problem, and goals.

Example of persona

As you can see in the persona from the character detail such as description, motivation, frustrations, the profile you can what the user needs for the use of the product.

The main attribute in persona :

Profile: Describes the personal information of the character
Description: A short explanation of who the audience is, what they do, and what their main focus is.
Motivation: A brief explanation of what’s driving the audience’s actions and choices.
Goals: The main things that this audience needs to accomplish. These are the high-level goals that they have: to view, find, compare, choose, promote, sign up, identify, donate, purchase, review, etc.
Frustrations: The main worries that this audience has. These are the potential issues that could impact their success.

Implementation Example in our project IGRI

In this persona, the main concerns from farmers are they don't have any platform to sell their harvest product and usually having trouble selling it. Another problem that comes up to this farmer persona is that they don’t have enough knowledge to farming in an effective way and don't know how to lower their production cost. Therefore, we create our project to be the solution to these problems and concerns based on their goals.

In this two feature is made to answer what the persona needs based on their goals and frustrations. Therefore, the product that is being made will be suitable for your target user.

In conclusion, the persona has so much benefit for software development. By making a persona, it will help to design an effective app based on what the user needs.

Disclaimer :

This is my first article for my Individual Review for PPL course at the Faculty of Computer Science, University of Indonesia.

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