- User personas are a classic UX research deliverable,
that, if done well,
can result in a lot of benefits to the product team.
They help us document complex user research data
in a format that's more memorable and relatable
and really easy to refer to over time
to guide the many, many decisions that we make
about the design of our products.
My opinion is that the majority of the benefit of personas
is simply just going through that process of creating them
and truly internalizing the data
and the themes that you discover.
Just doing that step solidifies abstract user data
in our minds so that we can constantly refer to it
and apply those insights
in all the casual conversations we have
about our products with our design team.
That being said, there are plenty of more formal ways
to employ personas on the product
and make a more tangible impact on the work we do.
One of the most useful ways to use personas
is to use them to evaluate features you intend to build,
or the user stories in your backlog,
by using a feature prioritization matrix.
To do this, start with a spreadsheet
and putting all the features
and user stories down that left hand column.
Next, you'll put the names
of your personas across the top row.
Now, you'll want to decide with your team what level
of priority each of your personas should have.
So if you have personas
and you haven't prioritized them in any way,
you'll wanna have that conversation first.
The reason for prioritizing personas
is because, inevitably, you're bound to run into instances
where what's good for one customer segment
is not good for another.
Of course, we wanna accommodate all
of our user persona segments as much as possible,
but if we strategically prioritize them,
we're able to make smart trade-offs
when we run into conflicting user needs.
You need to represent this priority
alongside the persona in the top row.
For this activity,
the priority should be shown as a percentage figure
that is representative of the level of priority
in relation to the others.
And by adding up all of the percentages,
it should equal 100.
So for example, in this situation,
I have three personas total.
The first one, Jessie, is our primary persona,
and that's represented by assigning him 50%
of the 100 total points.
Then we have Amit and Jennifer,
which are secondary and tertiary personas,
and they are given 30% and 20% respectively.
As a side note,
how exactly you decide who should be primary,
secondary, and so on,
should be determined by considering a lot of factors,
and there's really no one-size-fits-all formula
for doing this.
So this is very much a strategic business decision
driven by a lot of considerations.
That being said,
once you've determined that priority rating for each,
you can start looking at these features
through the lens of your customers.
To do this, we have this handy little scoring rubric.
For each feature,
you and your team should consider
what you know about each persona
and score that feature or user story
as it relates to your personas' needs and interests.
For example, let's say this first user story is something
that is critical for our primary persona, Jessie.
It's something that would create significant problems
for Jesse if it wasn't built into the product.
However, this feature isn't something
that would be likely a deal breaker for Amit.
He may use it occasionally,
but not having it wouldn't make or break his experience.
So for that reason, we'll give him a 0
because he's really neutral toward it.
For Jennifer, the team decides that this feature
or the way we intend to implement this feature
would actually be harmful to Jennifer.
Based on what we know about her,
it's likely to have a negative impact on her.
So for that reason, it receives -1 score.
You can also give the feature +1
if it's something slightly positive,
but not necessarily a must have.
Once you've done the scoring,
you can use the score to determine the weighted total score
for the feature across the group.
So by taking that score times the priority percentage
for each persona and summing those numbers,
you land on a single score.
If it's negative, then you would subtract that amount.
If you do this down your list or backlog,
the result is a list of features evaluated
from the context of each individual user
and from the perspective of your entire target audience.
Now you can look across these scores
and have some informed discussions about project scope
or priority of user stories.
It gives you a more objective way to discuss
and compare them moving forward.
One trick I've used in the past
is to actually tag my user stories
in my backlog with the score I have,
and that way I can refer to it in the future.
And that's it.
Beyond that, feel free to adjust this rubric
to suit a more nuanced discussion.
And the fun doesn't stop there,
you can employ the same process to evaluate
and prioritize a lot of other things
in relation to your personas,
such as new content ideas that you might choose to include
in the system over time.