An Introspection on User Persona

As part of the design process for Ajaib DeX, my team and I created 3 user personas. Looking back on it now, I would say that while the user research process that led to the creation of these personas was tremendously helpful, I could not say the same for the personas themselves. In this writing, I would explore the 'personas' we produced and why I think that they are of limited utility. Before I start, I would like to note that I am not an expert in UX research and my writing here is meant to provoke discussion and not disparage a particular idea.

Persona?

Personas are fictional representations and generalizations of a cluster of your target users who exhibit similar attitudes, goals, and behaviors in relation to your product. They’re human-like snapshots of relevant and meaningful commonalities in your customer groups and are based on user research. (Kim Salazar, Why Personas Fail)

At the center of user-centered product design, there exists a common practice to collect data and personify trends and patterns in the data collected as personas. These personas do not describe real people, but instead are the amalgamation of multiple individuals. These personas add the human aspect to the facts available and helps us to understand the patterns in the data.

Why create personas? Personas provide meaningful archetypes which can be used to guide the design process. Constructing personas will help answer questions and guide decisions according to the need of the users. For example, “How would A, B, and C react to feature X?” and “What do A, B, and C think, feel, and say?”

Components of a Persona

While there are many different variations and school of thoughts regarding the creation and presentation of personas, there are usually some commonalities/essential elements to each persona, namely:

1. (Fictional) Name
2. Photo
3. Background
4. Needs
5. Goals
6. Quotes

The list above is nonexhaustive as a persona could contain anything that describes and support a particular 'archetype'. Other datas may include demographics, frustrations, skills or environments.

Ajaib DeX & Persona

Ajaib DeX is a React (Native) mobile application that serves as a 'hub' for decentralized finance with functionalities for holding a 'crypto' wallet, sending transactions and trading through DeFi platforms. Therefore, in the development of Ajaib DeX, there needs to be different personas exemplifying the different features available to the user. Here are the personas we created:

Persona #1 - 'Beginner'

From the persona above, we decided to:

1. Create intuitive and easily used UI
2. Added easily seen 'return' so that user can see their current profit/loss

Persona #2 - 'Expert'

From the persona above, we decided to:

1. Show chart with live price so that user can use the data to make better informed decision.

Persona #3 - Infrequent User

From the persona above, we decided to:

1. Integrate 'fiat-onramp' so that user can more quickly and easily change fiat money to cryptocurrency

The 'Problem'

My problem with personas is encapsulated within this quote:

Personas are not a one-size-fits-all tool; they should be used with a specific, well-defined goal in mind. For personas to be useful, the data captured in a persona should reflect the goal for that persona and the scope of work it is meant to impact.

In general, I think that personas in the case of Ajaib DeX is too limited to be generally applicable to the whole application. We are creating a new application from the ground up and the user research we conducted did help tremendously in determining what the user wants. However, the personas that we produced are not really convincing in the sense that they do not really encapsulate the target user we want.