User portraits are like infographics, a means to involve all stakeholders in the progressive development of the product, ecosystem, and company. User portraits feed the strategy and lead to the next steps in the development of the product and the company. If you haven’t yet decided to turn to a UI/UX design and development firm for help in developing a web or mobile application, then in this article you will learn how to create a UX portrait of a user.
What is a user profile and what is its value?
A user portrait is a representation of a specific group of product customers, which contains comprehensive information on the questions “what users feel, how they think, what they want, what features and results are important to them, as well as what value they consume and in what volume.”
Such information distinguishes one user portrait from another. User portraits feed the strategy and lead to the next steps in the development of the product and the company.
Creating a user profile for digital product development
The instruction implies starting from scratch and continuous mining (mining) of qualitative and quantitative data about consumers. Accordingly, the more competitive environment the product, ecosystem, and company is in, the higher the requirements for the configuration, competencies, and performance of both the staff of UX researchers and analysts, as well as data science specialists, growth managers, product managers, copywriters, sales, designers
Step 1: Analyze all available information and build a data collection strategy
The customer of the project, for which the user profile will be developed, can become the first source of information.
To determine the trajectory of movement, you must take the following actions:
- Determine the position of the customer regarding the project.
- Determine the tasks that the customer wants to solve within the project.
- Identify tools to help solve problems.
- Detail the process of how the problem will be solved.
- Determine the results that the customer wants to receive.
- Determine the timing of the expected results.
- Anticipate issues and constraints that may affect performance.
- Prepare references to assess the availability of similar projects in the industry.
Stage result: setting the goal of assembling the user’s portrait.
Step 2: Interviews with internal stakeholders
After communicating with the first stakeholders in the project, you will be able to form a project plan and prepare a data collection strategy. These are important steps to correctly form a user portrait.
Meeting after meeting with representatives of departments involved in working with customers and the product, you will begin to extract new valuable data. Be open to new things, you are now interested in all available information on customers. As a result of such interviews, you will begin to notice commonalities and the first grouping criteria will begin to appear.
The persona method and the scheme for assembling information about users according to Osterwalder can be used here. The persona method is a qualitative research method. Its goal is to create multiple personas with the characteristics of product users (or potential product users). In the persona method, each character is a collective image of one group of your target audience.
Stage result: the flow of labeled facts about customers in the format of the Osterwalder model.
Step 3. Create a draft of a user portrait
This step involves visualizing the results of internal data collection. This approach allows you to determine the missing information about the customer. As a result, there is a high probability to generate a whole series of portraits.
Stage result: You have drafts of user portraits, on the basis of which you can start compiling a list of requests to get acquainted with customers according to the criteria you are interested in.
Step 4: Study ideal customers and unusual customers
Drafts allow you to form general guidelines for customers, but it’s time to study the details and write requests to meet customers:
- Analyze ideal and abnormal users.
- Create a list of ideal customers. Such information can be provided by the technical support, sales, product development, and user experience departments.
Abnormal customers are customers who, due to certain circumstances, have contacted customer service employees.
To effectively prepare for a meeting or call, you need to:
- study drafts of portraits;
- study trends in the international market;
- conduct a preliminary survey on questions of interest.
Stage result: you understand customer values.
Step 5. Data analysis and additional research
At this stage, it is worth doing exploratory data analysis, clustering as well as in-depth research. They will help identify hidden and valuable business segments. For example, during the research process, you can find a segment of users who consistently pay for services and are satisfied with the product. Such customers are not at the center of attention.
Stage result: user portraits have even more quantitative behavioral information, and access to hidden data is open.
Step 6: Submit your portraits
The main advice for this stage is to make the important things visible. For this step, you will need a profile submission template. You may even want to then develop its interactive dashboard or other interactive systems. This stage will also be useful to you as a blank for the technical specifications.
Step 7. Presentation of user portraits to the team, collection of feedback
During the presentation of portraits, it is important to determine the purpose of the study, and to acquaint the team with rough and final portraits of users. As part of the discussion, it is important to note the main details that were discovered during the data mining.
Work on the formation of user portraits allows you to save money and effort on the development of product functionality, and also opens up new areas of development.
Wrapping up
Creating a user profile requires a well-coordinated cross-functional team: engineers, growth managers, product managers, strategists, UX researchers, data analysts, data scientists, designers, salespeople, and technical support specialists – everyone who contacts customers and produces value. Dworkz is a reliable American company that will help you create a user UX profile and complete all the necessary steps in developing a digital product.
