Revisiting UX with Google Certificate: Personas, User Stories, User Journeys
I’ve spent quite some time in product design, working on a dynamic range of projects and teams. At the beginning of my career journey, UX design wasn’t even defined as a distinct career option — I found myself drawn into tasks and responsibilities that were later recognized as UX design.
Having learned extensively from practical experience in the field, as well as from various segmented researches and tutorials, I recently decided to enroll in Google’s certificate programs to fill gaps in my understanding. In the previous entry, I summarized the portion about UX research. At my profession, I have often collaborated with dedicated UX researchers or customer success teams, and relearning how UX researches should be conducted was refreshing and eye-opening.
This entry comprises notes from the second course, Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate, which is part of a 7-course series on UX design by Google on Coursera. Here, the focus is on generating design problems derived from insights gathered through user research. This process involves the development of personas, user stories, and user journeys. Ideating using these tools parallels the creation of a short story: personas are like characters, user stories are akin to plots, and user journeys mirror story outlines. These exercises serve as valuable tools for pinpointing problems that can address the needs of a larger user base, all while maintaining a focus on the user’s perspective throughout the process.
1. Personas: Identifying and Personifying User Groups
Personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users. They are created by conducting user research and identifying common pain points, which are UX issues that frustrate and block the user from getting what they need from a product. In general project, 3 to 8 personas should be developed.
Four different types of personas by Lene Nielsen
The source: Personas — A Simple Introduction
A) Goal-directed Personas: Focus on what the character wants to do. The objective is to understand the process they prefer to follow to achieve their goals.
B) Role-Based Personas: Focus on the user’s role in the organization, helping to inform the environmental context of where the product is used.
C) Engaging Personas: Utilize stories to create vivid characters, making user emotions, psychology, and backgrounds relevant to design.
D) Fictional Personas: Derived from team experience, aiding in initial sketching, but require research-backed personas for later refinement.
Benefits of building personas
A) Build a empathy: Humanize users, providing stakeholders with a clear understanding of who they are, also helping to make the user experience more meaningful.
B) Storytelling (of multiple personas): Aid in exploring and articulating user experience details to solve diverse user problems.
C) Stress-test designs: Help designers in creating designs that cater to a wide range of users, not just designers themselves.
2. User Stories: We’ve identified who. Now, what and why.
User stories are concise fictional narratives told from a persona’s viewpoint, guiding design decisions. The standard format — ‘As a [user type (Who)], I want to [action (What)], so that [benefit (Why)]’ — helps user stories remain focused on action and benefit.
Guide for useful user stories:
A) Who: Including diverse user representation helps to shift a focus away from one user type. Including their situations and key characteristics also provides context for the persona, enhancing understanding of the reasons behind their actions.
B) What: The action should clearly describe what the persona hopes will happen in order to avoid their pain points. The “What” should inform the team with actionable solutions that directly address the issue.
C) Why: Reasoning should be concrete to address present needs, but should also be flexible enough to accommodate future needs. Users may struggle to articulate future needs, such as transitioning from feature phones to smartphones.
Benefits of user stories
A) Easier to prioritize: Concise and informative format helps identifying the most critical issues to resolve.
B) Team unity: Informs clear objective to team members to stay focus on the goal.
C) User-centric: Clear stories help making the design approach from users’ point of view.
3. User Journeys: How They Reach the “what”
User journeys are the series of experiences a user has as they achieve a specific goal. To create a user journey, a series of actions must be outlined to get to the goal. Each action should then be elaborated on, covering both the physical and emotional journeys, as well as identifying opportunities for improvements.
A) Physical Journey: Detailing each action in the series by describing the steps required to complete it. For instance, to “pay at the register,” the user must find the register, wait in line, have items scanned, and pay the total.
B) Emotional Journey: Describing the user’s feelings at each action reveals potential pain points. For example, the user may feel “bored” and “overwhelmed” while waiting to pay at the register due to the queue.
C) Improvement Opportunities: Based on detailed steps and emotions at each action, identify opportunities to enhance the user experience. These serve as the groundwork for feature ideas that can significantly improve user experiences.
Benefits of User Journeys
A) Highlighting Unseen Pain Points: Documenting more detailed actions helps identify unexpected obstacles in the user flow. Ensuring diversity among users involved in documenting journeys is important to creating obstacle-free journey.
B) User-Centric Approach: User journeys help mitigate designer bias, ensuring that tasks and emotions are documented from a user-centric perspective rather than by “me”.
Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate course is the second course out of seven UX courses provided by Google. In learning about personas, user stories, and user journeys, I’ve found standard and simple formats extremely useful, especially for uniting the team. As a director and manager, I sometimes struggle to keep the team focused on goals. I aim to complete all the courses and document those I feel I need to improve on.
