What is a Persona?
What is a persona? And why do we need them?
Personas are a fictional snapshot of your ideal customer that is used to help customize the experiences offered within your products and/or services.
Why? to make sure each type of customer receives a personalized approach.
Gain a better understanding of a particular type of customer through aiding in producing journey maps. This will give you an idea of how to tailor your products and/or services to their needs.
- Identify Outreach
- Share understanding of your customers
- Customize the Message
The User Persona Process
Step 1: Gathering the Data
First you need information about your audience, it is imperative to gain as much information as you can.
Here is how:
• If your blessed to have past research or a researcher at hand start there
• Brainstorm – use your team’s knowledge, what have they learned? But, beware bias and learn to recognize it.
• Do I have web analytics? – if not get that going asap where available
• Make a few assumptions – If I have been on a project for a while I can usually make pretty good assumptions based on experience.
• Interviews and focus groups – you can learn more in 10 minutes with a user than a year with your team. Making sure you don’t make this the sole source
• Surveys – just remember people love to complain, so add salt
Step 2: Segment your audience
While there is no magic number of personas to create, it is important to keep in mind that a persona represents only a segment or subgroup of your target audience. It cannot be the entire target audience or as finite as an individual. Somewhere in between.
I usually start with users that exhibit a set of characteristics or traits that unite them. This can be as simple as what section they shopped in Men’s, Women’s, Kids, etc. to levels of engagement like how often a customer is coming in 3x week or 3x a year. Or even as advanced as the level of pertaining knowledge or experiences like an expert in research and cataloging vs. first time searching a catalog of things.
In an ideal scenario, there would be as many personas as subgroups, however, some user populations can be extremely diverse, creating an exorbitant amount of personas to deal with. When this happens, merging similar subgroups can help with the amount of time spent on maintaining these personas.
Most businesses will only require 3 – 6 to meet their needs.
The following is from the book the Persona Lifecycle:
- How many personas do I need? This goes back to our research and market segmentation.
- Which personas do I need? Chances are, some groups will turn out to be not worth designing for. Either because they’re too small or too specific. So you drop them.
- Which personas should I make primary or secondary? Here, you can decide based on which group is the biggest or the most important in terms of profits.
- How do I use secondary personas without designing for everyone? And it’s all about zooming out and keeping personas to a minimum.
Remember that personas must be inspiring and they must be relevant to your product and business goals.
Step 3: Build the Persona
This can be quite extensive or quite simple, but this is the way I put it all together.
Anatomy of a persona:
Beginning the construction
I call for scalpel then,
- Image – You need a face, Avoid using high-end models or stock unless that is your market
- Demographic info
- Persona Background
- Persona Goals – unless you’re a dating app, this is not blonde hair and blue eyes. Think as it Pertains to what they want from your product or service.
- Motivations and Pain Points
- Experience and skills
- Expectations
- Brands and influences
- Reach – technology and social platforms etc.
- Voice – What would they say?
Finally, Display them prevently and use them often when talking or explaining how something would would hinder or benefit users.
My User Persona Work
