Summary
Personas are extremely important when creating your app as it provides a fictional person that is representative of real users and it allows you to gain a better idea of how your persona will act and what their needs are of the app. It is important that you have at least 1 primary persona so that you are able to base your app on that users specific needs. Then you are able to create more generalised personas to fill in the gaps in the users needs.
A persona consists of information such as age, gender, occupation, hobbies, likes/dislikes and other details such as goals, skills, behaviour patterns, skills, attitudes and their environment. By listing this information, you given informed research to create a refined persona that you will cater your app to. Personas help you create a clear vision of your users rather than thinking about a generalised user that will not assist in the design of your app. Whilst making your app, you need to be asking yourself questions on how the user will use your app and their navigation thought process. There are many avenues and tasks that the user will want to perform on your app and you need to be able to design an app that allows you to be task and user dependent. An example of this is having a browse and search element to your app so that the app then becomes personal/user driven rather than the site suggesting a task to occur.
Most important aspect
The most important aspect of this lecture is the fact that you need to be able to identify the user needs and app objectives in order to further develop the persona used specifically for your app. Without brainstorming these ideas before hand, you will have little direction when creating your app and there is more room for unnecessary error. It is important that you create a persona before you go to the visual design.
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