Introducing personas
To make your business website useful for visitors, the first step is to understand them: their goals, how they behave, and their limitations.
This presents a conundrum since lots of people visit your site. How do you understand all their goals? Should you aggregate all your visitors together or look at them individually? If you look at them individually, how do you find the patterns among your visitors and potential buyers?
Aggregating visitors and then designing the site for an average visitor is a recipe for a dull site and will ultimately not satisfy anyone. But designing it for a particular person will only satisfy that one person.
Personas
The answer? Design the site for personas which are representations of particular types of visitors. Personas are fully-developed fictional characters that are a powerful tool because you and your team can imagine them as real people. Most teams develop three to five of these archetypal visitors.
Once you make the leap to the use of buyer personas, many design decisions become much easier. You can really picture what the persona would do in a particular situation.
Personas give a team a common reference point. When deciding what content should go onto a web page or what links should be on the page, the group can ask themselves what the persona of “Tom” or “Mary” would need to see on that page.
Origins
Personas have their origins in user-centered software design by developers like Alan Cooper. Marketers like Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg have adapted personas for use in Persuasion Architecture. Adele Revella also writes a blog on buyer personas.
Alan Cooper called personas “… a precise descriptive model of the user, what he wishes to accomplish, and why.” He says that “The best way to design for a variety of users is to design for specific types of individuals with specific needs.”
The Eisenbergs used the method of personas and adapted it to website development using buyer personas. “When we design personas for persuasive systems, we are primarily interested in understanding:
- how they initiate relationships
- how they gather information
- how they approach the decision-making process
- what language they use
- how they prefer to obtain agreement and closure”
In my next post I’ll describe the characteristics of personas in more detail.
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