Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 5]

Personas template

On day 3, we talked about how Design Thinking can help our team in keeping the user at the center of the conversation and how Empathy Maps are a great way to start consolidating the team’s knowledge about the users.

We all know that really understanding our users is fundamental to UX design. So today we will cover how Personas and Jobs to be done complement each other and are ~actually~ useful 😛

Personas

Personas are one of the best ways to empathize with our users. Giving them a name, a face and knowing details about their life helps you and the team to connect and design for them. do. Summing it up:

A photo or illustration that visually represents that persona
A quote, that best summarizes their motivation/relationship with your product
Demographics: age, family status & occupation (because it ties to their motivations)
Their feelings: main point points & frustrations, motivations and goals (also somehow related to your product)
Context: when and how they would be using your product.

Persona template

Together, these data-points should summarize “who” that group of user represents, “why” they use the product and “how” they are using it.

However, working with personas as the main resource to deeply understand our user’s motivation has proven more and more challenging over time, mainly because personas often overlap each other or have multiple motivations. It’s confusing, I know.

That’s why Jobs to be done are becoming another popular resource.

Jobs to be done

If you are not familiar with the concept, ‘Jobs to be done’ is used to focus on the key high-level tasks the user wants to achieve when using our product(s). By understanding what is the overarching goals we can focus on creating the best user experience for this. It aligns the team to solve the most important tasks.

For example, Marktplaats works on Customer Journey teams, and Rochelle works on the ‘Placing Journey Team’, which is the end to end experience from creating an advertisement online, managing ads to removing.

This is a simplified version of what a Job to be Done on Marktplaats placing team could be: “As an occasional seller, I need a way to create a successful ad so that I can sell my product as quick as possible”.

As you can see in this, the team identified the persona which is an occasional seller. They want to create a successful ad, and we know their motivation is to sell as fast as possible, maybe they are moving house. We can use this high-level Job to be done to guide us in everything we do in the project. How can we help them to create a successful ad? How can we help them to sell fast?

At Marketplaats, Jobs to be done are phrased in the way of :

And, the same user (aka, the same persona), could be using our product for different reasons, in different situations. But yes, it is still the same persona.

Another brief example would be:

At Envato, users can purchase digital assets that help them with their own projects. The assets could be CMS themes, After Effects templates or even an illustration.

Let’s use as an example a user that is a freelancer developer, and often purchases templates for his clients: he would be a frequent buyer and he would probably have specific budget and requirements for his client’s projects.

But then let’s assume he decides to work on a side project and he is creating a website to talk about a personal hobby. So our same “freelancer developer persona” hires us for two different jobs. In this context, if we ask: What job is the freelancer developer trying to get done?, we could get two different conclusions: “delivering my client’s projects in time” and the secondary one being “Creating a website for my hobby”.

Both jobs above will have different needs, different deadlines and specific budgets. And why is it important for us to understand both? Because these insights will actually help us understanding, in more detail than the persona sheets, why that user is cultivating a relationship with our product and what they are using it for.

After defining the main jobs to be done, some teams also break it down by “functional” and “emotional” criteria — that way you can understand what is the user’s rationale behind that purchase, but also what is their emotional motivations to engage with our product/service.

Jobs to be done template

The findings above are just useful if the team is aware of them and use it as their north-star. Make sure it’s well shared, repeated and used! 🙂

Ps.: Day 12 will be covering “creative ways to playback research findings to your team”. So hang in there — we will come back to this topic pretty soon!

What about you?

What are your means to keep the user at the center of the conversation?

If you are new to UX, jump in and create your first persona. Don’t forget to tag it with #30dayUXchallenge so we can see it too!

The templates used in this article can be purchased here.

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Gabi Braga — UX Designer at Envato Elements, freelancer at Toptal & beer enthusiast in her spare timeRochelle Carr — UX Designer, Placing customer journey team, Marktplaats, Ebay. Soft spot for red wine & tries to learn Dutch in her spare time.

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Get to know your user: personas & jobs to be done. was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Get to know your user: personas & jobs to be done.

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