October 2016
Beginner
20 pages
20m
English
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Chapter 9. Creating User Profiles
Just like marketers have a target audience, UX designers have user profiles or personas: descriptions of users, based on research.
What a Profile Is Not
First of all, let’s nail down what personas or profiles are not:
Personality types
Demographics
Characters in your “brand story”
Stereotypes based on your experience
Shallow or one-dimensional
Concepts
Predictions
So, What Is a User Profile/Persona?
Profiles or personas describe the goals, expectations, motivations, and behavior of real people. Why do they come to your site? What are they looking for? What makes them nervous? And so on. All the information you need should be in your research and data. If you can’t back it up with research or data, you’re just making shit up and you should stop.
Bad profile
Persona A is a male, between the ages of 35 and 45 with an above average income and education. They have at least one child and own at least one new vehicle. They are outgoing and career-oriented, and tend to be right-brain thinkers.
Why it’s bad
That might be great if you’re selling ads, but as far as UX goes, that profile is basically useless. Why? Because it doesn’t allow you to say “no” to any feature ideas. What sort of features does a male between 35 and 45 need? It could be anything!
Useful profile
Persona A is an experienced manager, mostly interested in one or two areas of expertise. They visit often, but they are pressed for time, so they focus on “collecting” content to read on the weekends. They tend ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.