Jobs to Be Done/Personas

In the article "Know Your Customers 'Jobs to be Done' " by Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon and David S. Duncan I found it surprising that a majority of businesses struggle with innovation because it is true that "Never have businesses known more about their customers". It turns out that looking for correlations and making conclusions based on demographic or psychographic information hasn't been very effective. Companies have failed to look at the "Jobs to be Done". From reading the article I learned that the "Job" is what someone is seeking to accomplish in a specific circumstance and customer circumstances are more important than characteristics. When designing, its important to take into account someone's everyday life, you want to create something that will make someone's life easier and be convenient enough to fit into their busy schedule. Another thing to note is that If a product is going to be pricy, then it is important to integrate a positive experience into the product. Emotions are very powerful, if something brings sentimental value or the experience never feels old, then the product will be cherished longer. In the article, "Personas Make Users Memorable for Product Team Members" by Aurora Harley, a persona is defined and the author offers guidelines for creating a persona. I have created a user persona for an app before and it felt like building the "perfect" person. My issue was just creating one user, I should have created multiple personas because that is more realistic. Although they are made-up people, personas need to be based on user research. It can be made-up information about real people, I combined a couple people I knew in real life to create my user persona. Showing other people or your team members your personas can help you decide if your personas are realistic and match the product you are designing.