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Create User Personas To Build Successful Software Products

16/04/2022

Create User Personas To Build Successful Software Products

 

User personas are a profile of your target audience created to better understand the user’s needs and wants. They are a fictional but psychographically and demographically researched customer. User personas are important for software products because it helps the company to know the user while designing and developing the product. 

 

A user-centric design is used to identify concerns and expectations of the user as well as to motivate the developers to think like one. The user persona creates empathy around the user. Businesses don’t just refer to them as business owners or marketing professionals and move on. This drives them to create a better product.

 

To learn more about user personas and how to build successful software products with them, explore this article.

What is a user persona Why is it useful?

 

The user persona is explicitly targeted to prioritize the user and the company. Every time a decision related to software product development is to be made, the user persona should be considered. When designing a new campaign, the user persona should be regarded, and at least one of the persona’s needs and desires should be met with your campaign.

 

User personas also benefit from the creation of organic social media ads and posts as they speak directly to the target audience. By building a strategy around the user persona, you can build a bond with the users they represent, which increases loyalty and trust. This ultimately makes the sales process more streamlined.

 

How To Build A User Persona?

 

Based on real-world data, the business will be creating a fictional user persona. The steps involved in the creation of this fictional user are as follows:

 

Market Research

 

Market research is a way to dig deep and know your users. Understanding your market and validating your idea helps in creating accurate personas. During the market research, a few questions like who are your existing customers? Who are your competitors targeting? Is your niche big enough? Are the users willing to purchase the software products? should be answered.

 

To fully gain user understanding, your company will need to do general market research, qualitative research, and quantitative research together in combination. General market research is a market analysis of the potential customers, the market size, and the competition. Qualitative research is about asking the ‘why’ question. It is an inquiry that seeks an in-depth understanding of the target audience. It also serves as a platform to produce survey questions for the quantitative data. 

 

Quantitative research is the collection and analysis of quantifiable data. It helps in understanding patterns, accessing averages, making predictions, etc. Information about the user demographic and psychographics are gathered from quantitative research.

 

Look For Patterns In The Data

 

After the market research, your company will have a ton of data to work with. It is now time to look for patterns in this data. Typically, it involves noting down drives and behaviors and how they match and differ. Demographic patterns like age, gender, location, education, and income are easier to spot than psychographic patterns like lifestyle choices, drives, interests, and frustrations. 

 

However, psychographics often matters more than demographics. This is because two very different individuals can have the same age, gender, location, etc. 

 

The demographics help us understand who the buyer is, while psychographics tells us why they buy. Psychographic information gives better influencing leverage and by tailoring the software products according to these specific groups, prospects can be converted into customers. However, demographic information is also quite important as a starting step.

 

Creating The Persona

 

The target user personas will be decided and created in the third step. The profile has to be a balanced mix of imagination and real information. For the creative part, give a name, age, background, and story to the persona you are creating. There is no need to get too detailed or embellish a lot of information since this may narrow your vision and exclude the people with the same goals and drives.

 

The things included in a persona are:

 

Demographic – Age, gender, geography, family size, and income bracket; Psychographic – goals, challenges, motivations, and personality type. 

 

Professional details (For B2B software products) – Job and role, tools used, decision-making power, proximity to business objectives or development; and bonus info like their story and personal taste. 

 

As time progresses and you gain more insights into the user, you can update these profiles too.

 

Sharing

 

The user persona is made for the entire company and not just the developers, marketers, and designers. The whole company should understand who they are doing business with and what kind of user they are trying to serve. Therefore, everyone from customer support to accounting departments should be made aware of and aligned with the user persona.

 

Development

 

A minimum viable product is a version of the software product that will be created specifically for early customers and their feedback. The MVP has enough features to be usable and provide insightful feedback for the future development of the product. The launch of the product is then followed by data collection from actual users. Complex strategy decisions are taken after the data is received, and newer personas may need to be released for further product development.

 

Software Development And Focaloid

 

Focaloid Technologies is an all-encompassing digital solutions provider. Our intricately designed software development process can support your company’s constantly evolving business goals. Our multidisciplinary team works with you from the idea phase to the design, build, development, and deployment of software products. We also don’t leave you hanging after the product launch, and support and maintenance for the product are provided.

 

Conclusion

 

The representation of real-world customers with user personas helps in the design and development of software products. They also make maps for future business. With user personas, the business can retain the existing customers and upgrade the business. The user persona doesn’t remain static, and as the product evolves, it evolves too. Continuously studying and developing user personas creates better software products and expands your market share.

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