There’s value in them there user personas
User personas, oh user personas, what have you become. Often an exercise in fictional biography writing, they get a bad rep as self indulgent industry waffle that adds some hours to the invoice. But there’s value in them there hills.
What’s a persona?
Personas are a summation of your different audience groups outlining who they are, what they’re aiming to do, and what their difficulties in achieving that aim are. They often include a short fictional bio to provide context, personality traits, and frequently used products and services to establish design patterns that they’re already used to. Most often used for digital products (websites, apps, point of sale, etc), but can also be useful when tackling branding projects and as a general target audience section of brand strategies.
Why are personas useful?
They take assumptions out of the equation. When created correctly they are an invaluable resource that provide rationale to design decisions, and can keep all aspects of a project on track.
So, what’s the problem?
Well, unless they’re founded in research (why are we called Background again?), they tend to be based on nothing but assumptions and magic sprinkles. And that can lead you down a lot of dead ends as privilege and preconceptions get double-downed upon. The result? You’re no longer solving the issues faced by your users — you’re solving the issues faced by your team.
How to do them right?
Doing them right takes time, but the value added is worth the time spent, and it all comes down to qualitative and quantitative data.
Qualitative:
Speak to your customers, actually pick up the phone and speak to them. Or add a survey to your website that asks for their thoughts (perhaps with an incentive prize draw to get more responses?). You’ll be amazed at how insightful your customers, or non-purchasing visitors, are about what is and isn’t working with your business.
Quantitative:
Quantitative data can be gathered from Analytics, and from your past customer data. As a starting point you’re looking for:
average revenue per user/customer
transactions per user
new versus repeat customers
conversion rate
This data can then be used on it’s own — for instance if you can glean that your customers only tend to purchase from you once and don’t return, perhaps you should be focussing on remarketing to those customers to bring them back, or perhaps your aftercare process is lacking and puts customers off purchasing again.
Or you can use this data to back up your qualitative personas and build a richer, more detailed picture that offers further insight into their habits and the ways you can market to them.
What’s next?
But you don’t have to stop there, with user personas in hand you can expand upon your findings and explore user journeys, customer journey maps, empathy maps, and much much more. All of these techniques are geared to develop true insight based on data, allowing you to make decisions that directly respond and avoid a scattergun approach to brand growth.
Wrapping up
If you’d like to find out more about creating user personas for your own business, here’s some further reading:
Guide to creating user personas - UX Planet
What are user personas and why are they important? - Adobe Xd Ideas
Or if you’d like help in finding what matters most to your audience and how to apply that to improve your business, get in touch!