Investigating app users: Creating personas for global applications

Sammanfattning: There are over 1.5 million Android applications on the market available today. This makes it important for the developers to know their customers. Knowing what their customers want from the application will grant the developers insight in what features they should implement. This report will present different methods of finding users and their behaviors in a certain application. The users' behaviors will be divided into different patterns, which then are translated into user personas and presented to the developers as a result. \\ \\ In order to find actual users, various methods were used. The different approaches were compared to each other in the aspects of their time consumption and value for the result. The most effective way to find users was through surveys posted in a app specific beta test channel that was set up by the developers for users to join voluntarily. The surveys gave information about the user behavior when interacting with the app. The respondents were able to sign up to help the project even more by participating in interviews. The interviews were held with the users who provided their email address and these interviews gave personality traits that could be used to make the personas more lifelike. The surveys and the interviews combined gave sufficient information to create personas for the majority of the user base with an error margin of seven percent.