Creating User Personas

User personas are a crucial part of any design project, as they identify the main audience on which the designers and developers can base ideas.

This ensures that throughout the process, it isn’t solely about those creating the project, but those who will inevitably use it.

Usability.Gov, Rikke Friis Dam of the Interaction Design Foundation, says how “Creating personas will help you understand your users’ needs, experiences, behaviors and goals […] It can help you recognize that different people have different needs and expectations, and it can also help you identify with the user you’re designing for. Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group.”

In order to better understand how personas work, let’s take a look at my personas made for iRobot, the creators of the Roomba.

The Process

For this project, I wanted to center around two of the main kinds of demographics that usually own a Roomba, a tech-savvy person who bought one themself, and someone who was gifted it.

Starting with myself, I am a person who has personally bought my own Roomba to help out with cleaning the house.

I am someone who also is pretty involved with current tech trends and culture, so I know more about what makes a robot vacuum good vs. other brands that might not perform as well.

One of the other crucial factors of someone my age is that they most likely dislike cleaning which makes a product like this one fit perfectly into their lives.

On the other hand, we have someone on the opposite side of the spectrum.

Guy Johnson is a persona created around those usually gifted a Roomba. More often than not, older people tend to receive products like this from family or friends, but have little clue about its features, functions, or even how to use it.

People on this side of the spectrum tend to not know much about technology, or struggle using it.

Though, even with this slight barrier, the upsides can usually be great for these people. Most older consumers of the product can benefit from not needing to clean and vacuum their homes every week, something that can really take the energy out of you in your later years.

With these two personas established as my base audience, it makes it much easier for me as a designer to better understand how I should design my app, as I want to be able to cater to those who understand the technology and want to utilize cool unique features of the product, and those who understand it a bit less and just need it to work.

To see more how I created my personas and how comprehensive they can become, view my full PDF document here or scroll down below!

Dam, R. F., & Siang, T. Y. (2023, September 25). Personas – a simple introduction. The Interaction Design Foundation. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/personas-why-and-how-you-should-use-them