User Experience Design Tips #11

💡How to define target audience

“You are not your user” is one of the fundamental rules in product design. Quite often, teams create products without thinking about the actual people who will use them. This false consensus effect has a major negative impact on UX. But it’s possible to avoid that if you invest in creating personas.

Personas are archetypes that describe the goals & behavior patterns of your target users.

Persona creation step by step:

1️⃣ Market segmentation

Market segmentation helps to identify & understand the different groups of potential users within a market. It’s all about grouping users into segments that share similar characteristics. The segmentation can be geographical, demographical, behavioural, psychographical, etc.

2️⃣ Persona creation

Once you conduct user research, you can start persona creation. Start with proto-personas—a draft of a persona based on your existing knowledge about target audience. Mark assumptions that you have about your users as it will help you to identify areas where you have knowledge gaps. Gradually increase the level of detail as you collect more information about users.

Alan Cooper introduced 5 types of personas in his book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum”:

✔ Primary personas: The main focus of the design. They represent the primary target audience. Your product should meet the needs of the primary persona.

✔ Secondary personas: Users who have additional needs not covered by the primary personas. They are important, but their needs should not be addressed at the expense of the primary persona.

✔ Negative (or Anti-) personas: Represent users who are not the target audience. They help to clarify who the product is NOT designed for, preventing unnecessary features that do not serve the primary and secondary personas.

✔ Supplemental personas: Users who might interact with the product in a more limited way. They help to understand less important use cases. Their needs are considered, but they do not drive the design decisions.

✔ Customer personas: Represent those who make the purchasing decision. Important in contexts where the user and the buyer are different.

3️⃣ Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)

JTBD (https://lnkd.in/dZGPZ8kG) is a powerful approach in persona design that focuses on understanding the underlying motivations and needs driving user behavior. It shifts the perspective from WHO the users are to WHAT they are trying to accomplish.

Define the fundamental tasks or goals that users aim to achieve with a product or service and focus on the context and motivations behind why users use a product or service.

✔ Understand context: Analyze the situations and contexts in which users perform these jobs.

✔ Define success criteria: Identify what users consider a successful outcome for each job.

🖼️ Difference between User personas and marketing personas by User Interviews

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