6 Benefits of Creating User Personas Before App Development

Creating user personas is important as it helps you in developing an app that customer would relate to. So, this factor should not be overlooked.

While making a foray into building an online presence, most of the time a guesswork might not be one of the best practices for gauging the audience that is targeted to build your own app and their behaviour towards the brands. The result that is witnessed is a dip in sales and decreased customer engagement. One of the most common practices, for the business owners is to simply sit with the prospective customer, but this experience is frustrating and expensive too. A much more simpler way to solve the issue is of course the creation of the user persona.

What is a User Persona?

User personas are employed during the early stages of the product design or development. User personas are simply fictitious in nature and are constructed with the help of sample data that is collected from the actual user. The personas plays an important role in the decision making, well in advance, before even the design has actually started. Personas reflect not only the common business needs, but also takes care of the shared understanding of the users in terms of the goals and objectives. Persona can also be described as the personified data that is centred around the user behaviour, attitudes, pain points experienced by the users, with regards to the product. The personas, as such are not only some hypothetical users, but are often given real names, their ages, qualifications, even the geographical locations and the systems that they are using. All these individual elements contributes towards the building of a larger target audience of the user, before the mobile app development process actually gets started. Both the personas and the market segmentation in the form of demographics such as age, salary etc are important before developing an app. The personas actually helps in the development process. Now, let us let look into some of the benefits of using a persona.

Here are 6 benefits of creating an user persona before developing an app

1. Establishment of a Consensus among the Users

Interpretation of raw data is difficult and the personas are useful to encapsulate the research made and helps the user to visualize the product in an easier way. A mobile app development team often comprises of developers with varying skills and it is the personas that establish a connection between the users, developers and the stakeholders and thereby reduce any sort of confusions and disagreements that may occur. The goal is that everyone understands, the target audience.

2. Promotion of User-focussed Outcomes

The app that is developed, often reflects the wish of the designer, rather than that of the user. The process of developing an app must have user specific goals. It is the perspective of the end user that ultimately matters, in the building of the app. Infact, for building a resonating app, the personas must be incorporated in all the phases of the mobile app development. Failing to adhere to this practice, will not enable the user to build an app that satisfactorily meets the demands of the user.

3. Validations of the Decisions Made

It is not just important to gauge the target audience of the user, but also the desires of the user. Without proper validations in place, the product may not comply to the requirements of the users. It is expected that the development process will not get astrayed and must primarily oblige to the user needs.

4. Positioning the Product

The user persona will help to position your product in the promotional phase. You are better equipped to overcome the challenges and the problems encountered during the product positioning.

5. Making Better Apps

Better product development is achieved by the creation of the customer archetypes. This will also ensure a long term association with the mobile app development business, aligning with the user requirements.

6. Helping in Focussed Reasoning

A brainstorming session between you and your team of developers, will be developing an app, but this may not be in conjunction with the user requirements, at the present times. All the decision making process must be based on focussed reasoning and the only way to get is the buyer personas.

THE AUTHOR

Saurabh Singh

CEO & Director