{"id":1191,"date":"2021-02-16T11:32:25","date_gmt":"2021-02-16T08:32:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/persona.qcri.org\/blog\/?p=1191"},"modified":"2021-06-24T10:03:21","modified_gmt":"2021-06-24T07:03:21","slug":"pain-points-and-personas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/persona.qcri.org\/blog\/pain-points-and-personas\/","title":{"rendered":"Pain Points and Personas"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this article, I share insights into what are pain points and how can personas — and more specifically the <\/span>Automatic Persona Generation (APG)<\/span><\/a> system that was built by our team help identify customer pain points.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Expressing customers with pain points as customer personas can contribute to developing better products and services, ultimately leading to a delightful UX for the end-user.<\/b><\/p>\n

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Identifying customer pain points is crucial for a good UX (Source: Unsplash<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What is a pain point?\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

A pain point refers to a very specific problem that customers of your particular product or service are experiencing. You can think of pain points as problems – plain and simple!<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, if a customer is using an e-commerce platform, and if the checkout and payment process is rather lengthy, then they might just quit and jump to another e-commerce provider. This is a pain point, which if a product team is able to identify and correct, can boost their <\/span>conversions<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Another example of a common UX pain point is the payment issue that users face when they want to pay for a product or service online. There is <\/span>evidence that nearly 68% of users abandon their shopping cart<\/span><\/a> when trying to make a purchase. Reasons for this could be numerous such as site flow not being properly designed, long and complicated check out process, etc.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Take the following example from a major British multinational retailer that specializes in selling clothing, home products, and food products.<\/span><\/p>\n

One weird thing about their checkout process is that the option for guest checkout is not prominent whatsoever on the site and if you are like me and do not like the user interface to interrupt your flow, you might need to spend time out to figure out where this option is! <\/span>This is a pain point with service that can lead to customers abandoning their checkouts<\/i><\/b>!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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The option to \u201ccontinue as a guest\u201d is not nearly as prominent as the \u201cSign In\u201d option, which is placed first, has two open form fields, and a prominent \u201cSign In\u201d button.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Identifying this pain point requires user research, user focus, and usability tests — basically, trying to identify what it is about your product or service which is frustrating for the user!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Value of personas in communicating customer pain points\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

Personas are fictional persons representing a group of similar users or customers of a product or service. These could be created either manually or automatically (more on that later) based upon your research to represent different customer types that use or might use your product or service.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

An example of a persona is presented below:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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A flat-file persona depicting customer needs, motivations & pain points (Source: Careerfoundry<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As you can see from the figure above, a persona profile contains details about the customer such as demographics, needs and goals, motivations, and also pain points.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the above example, <\/span>notice the pain points<\/span> that this persona has.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For instance, reading her pain points makes me think of Alex as an active and methodical person, who is busy and needs one place to check weather conditions for different activities and nearby locations. But, the current apps that she is using are not attractive (i.e. have a bad user interface), inaccurate, and overall have created a bad UX for her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, what does this pain point tell us? For UX practitioners, this tells us that there is a potential market here for the development of a good weather application that is accurate (perhaps draws and displays information from multiple sources and updated regularly) and has a modern, clean interface! Essentially,<\/span> these pain points informed the need for the design and development of a dedicated application for a user segment that matches Alex!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

An added value of using personas is addressing customer pain points often means the involvement of many teams, managers, executives, and others. All of these teams must communicate with each other while <\/span>keeping the customer in mind<\/span>. <\/span>Personas are great for this!<\/b> They add the human touch to what would otherwise be cold facts from your research. People <\/span>can relate<\/span><\/a> to personas more easily, as the portrayal of real people in them is designed to minimize reliance on personal viewpoints when discussing customers\u2019 experiences, perceptions, and mental processes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It is safe to say that <\/span>personas play a crucial role in helping identify customer pain points, which in turn governs design decisions for a product or service, which if done correctly can lead to an overall good customer experience<\/i><\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Use of personas to express customer pain points – A personal example\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n

During my doctoral research work at Tallinn University, I developed a course on trust in computing. The main assignment for the students was to use a scale (fancy word for an online survey) that I developed to <\/span>measure trust in technology<\/span><\/a> and apply it to their projects.\u00a0 One consistent feedback that I received throughout the course was that the application of the scale is exceedingly difficult, especially for students who have no background in statistics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Since the class in which the course was taught also included practitioners, such as UX researchers, UI designers, etc., and some of them had to measure trust in actual industrial projects that they were a part of, they provided important feedback of having an online tool which can be developed to measure trust, results of which are automated and can be visualized easily.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I took these comments seriously and wanted to dig a bit deeper in understanding the frustrations and pain points of two particular sets of users:<\/span><\/p>\n