The Role of Personas in User-Centric Testing

Developers focus on creating the ultimate product with a modern design. Testers focus on ensuring the application functionality works within the application per customer requirements. The application’s functional and technical elements often get all the attention – leaving customer needs to easily get lost during a busy development iteration or sprint.

Agile testing teams that practice user-centric testing prioritize the customer’s needs. Focusing on the customer typically requires a change of mindset or work habits, such as digging deeper to understand your user on a fundamental level. User personas provide insights into the unique uses and goals of your application users. Persona-based testing helps the team focus on a wider variety of possible users to ensure the functionality meets everyone’s needs. 

This guide describes the basics of user personas, including key attributes for testing and how the approach provides significant customer value.  

User persona types

User personas are fictional customers created based on customer research. Personas typically come from the product manager or a UI/UX team, and they drive application design to prioritize the customer experience. Each persona is unique but helps developers and testers understand the user’s needs, experiences, behaviors and goals for using the application.

User personas don’t describe real people. Instead, they are based on a conglomeration of customer data. Three types of user personas are important for user-centric testing: 

• goal-directed
• role-based
• engaging

Goal-directed personas focus on what the user wants to accomplish by using the application. These personas define a user according to the workflow they use to accomplish their goals. For example, consider how an individual uses a U.S. tax filing application, and how it varies if you are a professional accountant, tax advisor or IRS auditor. The workflows are distinct for each sample user. 

Role-based personas are based on the user’s goal and behaviors. Each user has a role within a business, and these personas anticipate these roles’ behaviors. Role-based personas help testers distinguish how each user’s role impacts how, where and why they use the application. 

A UX/UI designer creates the engaging persona based on an existing customer’s use history. Engaging personas are created using actual customer data that’s tracked in the application or received through surveys or customer feedback. Engaging personas might be more accurate based on the quality of the customer data. 

Key user persona attributes for testing

A persona-based testing strategy takes advantage of the information for each persona to develop tests based on the behaviors and goals of the target user. The persona might not cover every single detail of the intended user, but it provides a baseline for their expected needs for testing purposes.

User personas can be verbose, so testers should focus on key attributes of a persona, including: 

• demographics
• user role
• user goals and needs
• pain points
• technical expertise
• behavioral patterns

User demographics, role, and goals help narrow down tests to focus on specific user objectives. Pain point information highlights common frustrations users experience in other software applications or previous versions. Testers must verify that test cases address these challenges.

A user’s technical expertise informs a tester how to approach an application. For example, navigation menus are sometimes clear to experienced users but confusing to new users. Still, it’s crucial to create tests for all types of users regardless of experience level. In the same manner, testers can use personas to identify missing workflows or functional paths through the application that are technically correct but require more intuition to specific types of users. When creating tests, recognize how different personas approach a similar action. Differences in user behaviors help testers identify hidden usability and functional issues.

Baking personas into software testing

The first step for incorporating persona-based testing into your team’s strategy is finding or defining the persona information. Most Agile teams have a product management group, and this is the group that typically produces personas for UX/UI design. If not, consider working with a product manager or UX designer to create personas for the application. Customer support might also provide useful information about real customer pain points.

With the personas defined, work them into existing test cases or develop them as independent test suites specifically for persona-based testing. A separate test suite might be quicker to implement and cleaner to manage over the long run, whether automated or manual. Create the test suite, and begin executing tests. When entering defects or product enhancement requests, reference the personas and which one presents an issue. 

Another option is to leverage a crowdtesting provider like Applause. A crowdtesting provider can source teams based on the persona data and functional or usability issues within an application. With crowdtesting teams, the internal team manages the input but not the test execution. The crowdtesting spins up only when needed, alleviating the team of having to develop, manage and execute additional test suites. An additional crowdtesting benefit is the expanded ability to test the application on a variety of devices, platforms and configurations.

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