Persona: User-Centered Design in Agile Development
User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers and other stakeholders focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. UCD calls for involving users throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques so as to create highly usable and accessible products for them.
— Definition of user-centered design (UCD) by the Interaction Design Foundation
User-centered design (UCD) is one of the methods that used in interaction design process. UCD focus on collaboration with users in every product design and development. The main concept of UCD design activity is to actively collaborate with the user so that the design will match the user needs and expectation. UCD will take into account the user’s requirements, objectives, and feedback so that the design can more relate with the users.
UCD Flow
Generally, user-centered design is an iterative process that focuses on understanding the users in all stages of design and development. Each iteration of the UCD approach involves four phases. First, the designers will try to understand the context and requirements in which users may use the product. Then, the design team move to the designing phase, in which they start to develops the solutions. When the team has come up with a solution, they begin to make a prototype that represent that solution. The team then proceeds to an evaluation phase where they have to evaluate the outcomes of their design against the user’s context and requirements that they gathered earlier in the first phase to check how well the design is performing. To measure how well the design is, they see how close it is to satisfies all of the user needs. After that, the team either makes further iterations of these four phases or release the final product if the evaluation results are satisfactory.
User-Centered Design and Agile
Agile methods are become a common approach in software design and development. With the collaborative customer and an iterative, test-driven approach, Agile start to gain acceptance as an efficient and effective ways to develop software products where we must gather some requirements from the users first. User-centered design fits very well with Agile methodology like Scrum, primarily because we focus on what the user actually needs and develop the software based on that in incremental ways.
Here are some advantages if we user-centered design in agile methodology:
- Customer Focus: All activities are focused on the user needs.
- Iterative Development: We can provide the deliverable as early as possible with frequent incremental in those deliverable of working software. That will make the project more transparent and will reduces project risk because we can get feedback from early stage and will get feedback regularly. With that feedback, we also can make further improvement.
- Transparency: All stakeholders will provided with maximum visibility into project progress because we always communicate with the users and stakeholders about the software design and development.
- Higher customer satisfaction: User will receives what they want and how they want as we deliver product that is based on what is requested by our target users.
- Risk reduction: As we always clarify with our user and get their feedback, the risk that we are going to the wrong direction will be reduced.
- Productivity: We will always do what the user wants, without spending time on unnecessary things or features that the users most likely will not use or like.
User-centered design vs. Human-centered design
User-centered design is similar with human-centered design, but is different. We can see that as: All users are humans, but not all humans will be our users. So that, in UCD, we must perform a deeper analysis of the users that will be our target. It can be the general characteristics of a person and their preferences. We can use that data to come up with the right solutions.
User-centered design will takes into account the segment of our target user based on their age, gender, address, and occupation. We also perform a deep research from how user will interact with our product and what is their vision of how the product should look like and behave.
Typically, the following are analyzed to get a better idea of what our target users want:
- Persona: A persona is created at the beginning of the process to have a better visualization of our target user, who we are trying to reach. It is a representation of a particular group of people with the same characteristics. Persona help us to make right decisions about our design and feature of the product. When we make and understand the persona, we can know better what the user need, what design are good to make, and what functions are nice to add and have.
- Scenario: It is a “daily life” of our target (our persona). It is about how our persona will interact with the system. Here we put every small details both emotional and physical ones to have better understanding of the user.
- Use case: A series of steps that the persona will perform to achieve their goals.
In this article, we will focus specifically in Persona
Persona
“Personas are the single most powerful design tool that we use. They are the foundation for all subsequent goal-directed design. Personas allow us to see the scope and nature of the design problem… [They] are the bright light under which we do surgery.”
— Alan Cooper, Software designer, programmer and the “Father of Visual Basic”
Persona are fictional characters, which we create based upon research that is done by the team including the stakeholders. We create persona in order to represent the different types of user that might use our product in a similar way. Creating persona can helps the designer to understand what the users really needs and also the user experiences, behaviors and goals. In order to get a representative point of view, we divide users into manageable groups and represent each of the group with a typical embodiment, and that is what we call a Persona.
Persona contains the characteristics of the user that can be used to know the user’s segment like age, gender, address, and occupation of the user. Based on these segments, we can get more specific information about our target user, such as their general description and also their goals, motivation, and frustration. Persona will guide our ideation processes and help us in making design and developing the software product and will create a good user experience for each target user group.
Here are some example of my team’s product (Bank Jelantah) persona:
And here are other example of Persona in Library Management Application:
Each of the persona above represents each segment that will be the role of the user that most likely will use our product. With persona, we also get to know better about the requirements from the user because we know what is likely to be their goals, motivation, and frustration of the user when they use our product. Those persona are created through collecting and analyzing data by our team and also have been approved by our stakeholder.
Source:
https://usabilitygeek.com/user-centered-design-introduction/
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/user-centered-design
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/personas
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them
