User Persona Creation

I was tasked with creating a user persona. The brief talked about how a persona is created by gathering common points from multiple user interviews. Recognising this would be a resource problem most people on an introductory course won't have access to, we were tasked with creating a persona essentially from scratch, just to get the practice of doing it.

Here are the notes I took before creating the persona profile with the online tool by Hubspot.

Step 1 - Questions about the product:

Who are typical users?

- Full-time YouTube content creators

- Hobby content creators

- General users showcasing something they have done in one-off videos

What do they do?

- YouTube videos as an at-home business

- People following general interests outside of their obligations

- Students

What's a typical day for them?

- Recording session in their chosen field

- Vlogging?

- Reviews?

- Gaming?

- Talent Journaling?

- Editing clips together

- Adding sounds, music and visual effects

- Preparing a thumbnail

- Upload

- Checking video stats - users, popular and skipped sections, income

- Gaining insights into what works best for their channel

- Finding out if any extra content added in editing causes problems

Step 2 - Choose a user:

- Full-time YouTube content creators would be a most likely candidate for the service

Step 3 - Name and describe a user persona:

Name: Charles Devon

Challenges and pain points: Using background music for review content causes copyright issues

Happy/satisfying moments: Getting their message out to a wide audience and seeing discussion

Goals: Create stand-out and entertaining review content with great added variety

- Added from Step 4

Charles likes to keep background music running in his videos, and likes to keep the music varied so as to avoid losing viewer interest. Unfortunately, he struggles with knowing what music is actually safe to use, and what music might have legal teams claim or even strike down his videos. He calls this issue a copyright minefield, one which threatens his channel every day, as music that is okay to use one day, may suddenly get him in trouble later down the line.

Step 4 - Product research

Common complaints amongst content creators, particularly those using it full-time as a business, is the volatility of the copyright landscape. Much of the added content used to prevent videos from feeling dry and stale will often be okay to use, but outside of those marked as royalty-free, this often changes. From new agencies taking on the handling of copy protection to false claims by bad actors on a wide scale.

Many YouTubers find there is no warning in place to avoid copyright claims and strikes, and that they are left to find out when it is too late, being forced to silence or delete entire video sections to keep them business-viable.