Why are Personas Necessary in Agile Development Process?
Persona, if you’re an Army (not me), you’ve probably recognized it as one of BTS’s albums, and if you’re a gamer, you’ve probably heard it as in the game. But for UX designers or software engineers, persona is something that plays a pretty big role in order to build a user-friendly application.
But really though, what is persona? In this context, according to agilemodeling.com, persona is defined as an archetypical user of a system, an example of the kind of person who would interact with it. It is first introduced by Alan Cooper in 1998 to help him understand the necessity of a software’s feature from a user-centered POV.
So what’s the goal of creating personas? Well, personas are usually built based on the user research, usually conducted by UX researcher, to determine the possible types of users who may going to interact with the system that is going to be developed. The main goal of creating personas is to create empathy and understanding toward the system’s end users. And have you ever heard of Designer-User Gap? It is basically the gap of understanding or perspective between the designers and the users. That’s when the designers think something is good enough, but the users might think that it is actually too much, or too little. That’s why persona so important to help us build the bridge over the gap.
Persona also helps the product teams to focus on strategies in product development, such as determining which feature requests should be prioritized in the development process. It helps in communicating the result of user research. Why? Because in agile software development, the designers, developers, and other product workers work in a team. Everyone of them has different experience, expertise field, and perspective. But as a team, everyone needs to agree when it comes to decision making. This is when persona comes in play, to help them find similar perspective and understanding between them, or even with the stakeholder.
Then how do you define a persona? First, we need to understand the 4 keys of information in order to build a well-defined persona:
- Header, which includes a fictional name, image, and quote that summarize what matters the most to the character relating to your application.
- Demographic profile that’s based on facts and summarized result from user research. It includes something like personal and professional background.
- Scenario, which is how would the character interact with your app to achieve their goals.
- End goals, that define what the character wants or needs to achieve.
After that, we need to fulfill the sections that needs to exist in our persona, which is name, picture, demographic profile (gender, age, status, occupation, etc.), needs and goals, frustrations, and environment. Here are the examples of a persona:
How do I implement personas in my team’s current project?
Me and my team have
Meanwhile, in its implementation in my current project with my team, personas help us see from a user’s perspective. It helped us create the high fidelity design of our application. Like in our application, which is Paperless Judicial Process, it helped us made a decision where we didn’t have to make an interface that is aesthetically complex, because most of the persona demanded an easy and smooth flow of the application. So instead of focusing on the UI, we’d rather focus on the UX of the app. Here is the example of our project’s persona:
As a conclusion to our main topic, persona is necessary in agile software development process to help the product team and the stakeholder find similar understanding of what is needed and what is not by the users to deliver the best product with maximum functionality, because at the end of the day, a software is made to be used by the users themselves and we need to make sure that they are reaching a high satisfaction in using it.
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