User Personas - UX Words to Know

What are user personas?

In UX, personas are like fictional characters representing different user types. They're based on user research, painting a picture of who the users are, what they want, and why they want it.

Example

Take 'Emma', a user persona for a library app. Emma is a college student juggling assignments and research papers. Knowing her needs and behaviors allows us to create a user-friendly app for Emma and users like her.

If Emma needs quick access to academic resources, we incorporate features to meet that need, like a helpful search tool or a "save for later" function.

The concept of personas was brought to light by Alan Cooper, a pioneer in interaction design. He saw the value in creating personas as a tool to humanize users and design with empathy.

Creating well-defined personas is a crucial step in the design process. It ensures we're designing for real needs and not based on assumptions.

By using personas in UX design, we can design more intuitively and effectively, making our products not only good-looking, but user-friendly and useful too.