“The Initial Mystery that attends any journey is: how did the traveler reach his starting point in the first place?”

-Louise Bogan (American Poet)

The reason why I love this quote is because it makes you strongly aware of what you could not possibly know about your hero. As designers, as much energy as we dedicate todeeply and intently focussing on our users’ journey, there are still factors outside of the journey that will have profound impacts on the journey itself. 

For the most part, uncovering the core of a user’s experience is impossible without them. However, this is a common position that designers will find themselves in. Whether it is no access to users, limited access, or you’ve never had users at all, strategies can be used to increase awareness and perspectives of the user experience. 

Creating personas to better understand user experiences allows designers to reason endlessly with direction and specific reasoning. In comparrison designers can reason about their users in general, however, this methodology lacks direction and it is more challenging to identify specific influencers for users. User experience expert, Kevin O’Connor writes, “as the marketplace shifts from a mass manufacturing to a mass customization model, customers needs and desires are more accurately identified through the development of personas rather than through demographic data.” (UX Magazine). This article is from 2011 and it still holds true. It is as important as ever because now our youngest generations have been exposed to highly customized experiences through internet exposure their entire lives. 

Through creating persona’s for different Souncloud users and myself (as a Soundcloud user), I was able to gain deeper insights to the user experience on their platform. One of the focusses while creating personas is the usability of the product. According to digital.gov, “Usability refers to the measurement of how easily a user can accomplish their goals when using a service.” Using our personas to more deeply understand this, we can see that usability will vary across users. For example, if one user is subrsribed to a premium version of soundcloud and has the application one their phone, following a shared link to a song would be as easy as clicking the link. The usability in this scenario is high. However, for a user that does not have an account or the application, they would have to jump through several hoops before they can hear the shared link. This could include things such as creating an account, remembering an old password, or downloading the app. With each one of these steps not only does the usability decrease but the user’s desire to use the service also decreases. By creating different personas with diverse backgrounds and motivations, it will help designers uncover new insights about their users and provide the necessary context that makes those insights meaningful