- Usability Testing
- Roadmap Planning
- Idea Prototyping
How do we make personas better at Dinghy w/Nosipho Nwigbo
This post is part of a series
UX Design to WIN in Business
Join us on this podcast as we dive into the world of user experience and its crucial role in your business's success.
How to leverage UX Design to help your business win
3′ reading timeWhat is UX, how are we qualified to talk about it and how does it help your business
2′ reading timeHow usability testing saved our client from wasting 5 figure ad budget
2′ reading timeWhere does UX sit in your company?
2′ reading timeHow do UX and SEO help your company?
3′ reading timeHow we reduced CleverCards support tickets by 60%
2′ reading timeWhy UX Audit is a must for your business?
3′ reading timeCrafting a Unique Voice on Brand Identity w/ Florian Zeitler
3′ reading timeDesigning for International Markets w/ Sylvia
3′ reading timeUX Research & Testing – The Dinghy Way w/Nosipho Nwigbo
2′ reading timeThe Secrets to a Seamless UX in Agile Teams
3′ reading timeIntegrated UX Design, real example
4′ reading timeUnlocking the Business Impact of UX Design
6′ reading timeHow do we make personas better at Dinghy w/Nosipho Nwigbo (currently reading)
4′ reading timeSimplifying Digital Transformation for Business Growth
5′ reading time
Welcome to the blog! This post is a summary of the YouTube video shown in the header, where Nils Borgböhmer and Nosipho Nwigbo from Dinghy discuss the common pitfalls of personas and how Dinghy redefines the process to create more accurate and dynamic personas. We'll dive into the challenges with traditional personas and offer insight into how Dinghy solves these issues.
tl;dr Link to this headline
Personas often fail due to their static nature, inventiveness, and outdated information. At Dinghy, we continuously update personas based on research, ensuring they evolve with the target audience. This dynamic approach helps create products that truly meet user needs, making the persona creation process more meaningful.
In this podcast episode, we took a deep dive into the subject of personas. Personas are vital tools that can help businesses and designers better understand their target audience, but often, they are created poorly. Many companies struggle with personas because they’re treated as one-time exercises, not evolving or updated to reflect the target audience’s changing needs. That’s where Dinghy comes in, with a method that addresses the four main issues of traditional personas.
At Dinghy, we believe that personas are useful, but only when they are dynamic, continuously updated, and grounded in research. In this post, Nosipho walks us through the Dinghy approach to making personas more practical and insightful.
Why Personas Often Fall Short Link to this headline
As Nosipho explains, traditional personas are often:
- Too Static: They quickly become outdated as the business and market change.
- Inventive: Many personas are filled with assumptions rather than data-backed insights.
- Time-consuming: They take a lot of time to build and are rarely revisited.
- Isolated: Many are created in a silo, without considering input from other departments or actual user research.
The Dinghy Approach: Continuous Evolution Link to this headline
At Dinghy, we tackle these issues head-on. Nosipho described our process in detail, starting with stakeholder interviews. These conversations are essential to gathering assumptions, insights, and any available data from within the business. From there, we move to secondary research to gather broader industry insights.
The next step is to create a hypothesis of who the target audience might be, always keeping in mind that this is not a rigid definition. Once this hypothesis is formed, we conduct primary research like interviews and user testing to validate or adjust our persona assumptions.
This continuous feedback loop means that our personas evolve alongside the business, ensuring they always reflect the most accurate, up-to-date version of our audience.
Why Are Personas Important? Link to this headline
While personas can sometimes feel like extra paperwork, they’re crucial to aligning a business around its true audience. Personas help us step outside our own perspectives and focus on the needs of the user. As Nosipho mentioned, it’s about empathizing with our users—understanding their behaviors, attitudes, and desires—so that we can design products that truly meet their needs.
Personas also serve as guidelines for everyone involved in product development, from marketers to designers to business strategists. They ensure that everyone is on the same page about who they’re designing for and what problems they’re solving. By continuously evolving these personas, we ensure that our teams always work towards the same, user-centered goals.
The Future of Personas Link to this headline
As Nils pointed out, one of the most exciting aspects of using personas is how they can streamline the entire product development process. By providing a constant point of reference (a “North Star”), teams can move faster and more efficiently, always asking: Is this for our target audience?