Case study: Creating user personas for Google’s UX design certificate
The final project for Week 2 of Course 2
This article is part of an ongoing personal journal, where I talk about my experience taking Google’s UX Professional Certificate on Coursera. This assignment is part of Course 2: Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate.
I’ve reached the end of Week 2! This course has 5 weeks, so there’s still plenty to cover. But it feels like an achievement. This week went over a lot of information. Over this section of the certificate program, we learned how to conduct user interviews and create empathy maps from the data. You can read about the details of my process in Part 1 and Part 2.
The final project is to use the insights we gained to create two user personas for our chosen project. (Mine is a shopping app for an organic seed catalog in Virginia.)
The user personas are fictional characters that are created using real data gathered from our interview subjects. Here’s what the course material says -
“Personas are created by conducting user research and identifying common pain points, which are UX issues that frustrate and block the user from getting what they need from a product.
As you create personas, look for the most common themes in your data and group the users who personify those themes together.”
As I wrote about before, when I first went over my interview responses, it seemed like no two users had the same things to say. However, putting together my empathy maps allowed me to find common themes and pain points to work with.
To create my personas, I opened a Google doc and created two categories. Each category would have distinct characteristics that would inform a specific persona. As I read through my data, I asked myself what was important to distinguish one category from another. Age? Shopping habits? Frustrations? Lifestyle? Goals? Luckily, the course provides some sample personas and specific instructions for figuring this out.
Here are my categories:
This really helped me envision two different people. In addition to the seed-purchaser data points, I pulled specific circumstances from my interview subjects to create these characters. For instance, one of my subjects works as a nutrition counselor. Two of them are named Sarah. One is Asian-American. Two are queer. One is a supply chain manager for an oil and gas company.
I also created little illustrations for my characters!
Meet my personas, Sarah and Bill:
Since almost all of my subjects stated that buying local is a huge factor for them, and my seed company is located in Virginia, I decided to develop characters who are Virginia residents. I did some research and created backstories for my personas. Although I didn’t include all this data in the assignment deliverables, I have it in a Google doc so that I can empathize with them as real users.
For instance, Sarah Santiago is Filipino-American. She lives in Arlington because she works at a real oil and gas company located there. I looked into the Filipino population in Virginia to get some details and found that they are the second-largest Asian population in the Commonwealth. So I can envision Sarah’s family, upbringing, and life in her hometown of Hampton Roads, which has a large Filipino community.
I chose the last name Miller for my character Bill because it is one of the oldest and most common names in Virginia. I imagined him as a gay man whose family has a long history in Virginia. His partner, Louis, is Cuban-American. I imagine them to be very active in the social equity and gay rights communities. They don’t have children but they have two spoiled Yorkies.
I also added personality details when I created the illustrations. Sarah wears a fun hair clip. She’s very serious about her career and works in a conservative industry, but she’s only 34 and likes to keep her look a little trendy. She’s on-call for her job, so her company phone never leaves her side. Bill is an outgoing and gregarious person. He’s getting a really distinguished salt-and-pepper look to his beard and he’s leaning into it. He wears a fun checked shirt and bow tie because likes to feel dapper.
I have a really visual and active imagination, so I can envision many mundane daily scenarios that Sarah and Bill experience. This makes them feel like friends of mine, and I want to design an app that they would both find really useful and pleasant.
This assignment is peer-reviewed- our first one! I submitted mine (fingers crossed) and now I have to go review some of my classmate’s personas.
Next up is Week 3: creating user stories and user journey maps. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for Sarah and Bill!
Cheers, Rachel
