Personas for user experience design
How can we use them to benefit design clients?
Image from UIUX Den.
Personas in user experience design and understanding what audience you’re targeting your work towards is critical to good design. Personas help the designer conceptualize who they want to target when creating certain web designs and any other work for their client. For a client like Nike, understanding who they target and how they want to sell their products is key to getting a better understanding of how to work with them.
I am a direct consumer of Nike, shopping on their website and at their physical locations, they have solid products that have been supported by many for decades. While others do influence my decisions along with other similar personas in the same space, we eventually go through and make the purchases or make the decisions on our own. My persona may be influenced and very similar to others but since the brand of Nike is so well known that ultimately influences why I want to buy from them and how they overall reputation influences me.
I found that as a user for my persona, I wanted a brand that has a simple website with ease of use at top of mind, along with being able to find the products that I want easily. Like I mentioned above, I also found myself being influenced by the overall brand strength and my family members who gave insight into the brand to me at a young age, influencing my decisions.
In a hypothetical example of a persona that would buy from or use Nike products, I looked at Christian Pulisic, a world-famous soccer player and Nike sponsored athlete. Since Nike does take up so much of the overall market-share of the sports industry, I wanted to choose an athlete that has direct ties to the company as well as has the option to buy from them and use their products if they so choose to. I found that Pulisic would like to have an easy-to-use website for the brand and something that they can find the products that they want easily. As a sponsored athlete along with many other possible athlete personas that Nike may create, they want to see themselves on the website and in Nike products posted on the website.
For his persona and fellow athletes from the youth level to professional level, they can certainly be influenced by fellow teammates, coaches and sports influencers on social media. All those individual groups of people can play a role in what products athletes want to buy and how they can be influenced to buy or use other products over others.
These personas can be duplicated for so many other people looking to shop for athletic wear at Nike and other competitor brands. Both are extremely similar to others and can be replicated and edited to better fit others that are in a similar space.
You can see my full PDF on these personas at the link below.
https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:b996bc27-98c0-4ce4-b95f-ce81b2047793
