Characteristics of personas
In Part One of this series, I introduced the use of buyer personas for business website development. In this post we’ll look at the characteristics of personas in more detail.
Personas are based on user behavior and goals. They capture the behavior of representative individuals and the motivations that drive the behavior.
Personas are based on research. The primary research method is to interview potential visitors and buyers. Instead of asking them what they want from your website (which they may not know), focus on finding out what they do, what frustrates them, and what satisfies them. Your research will mainly stand on these behavioral variables plus some demographic variables.
Personas are assembled around behavior patterns. After interviewing several people you can look for patterns in their behavior and construct your personas around these clusters of common behavior.
Personas have different types of goals. These include:
- life goals (big picture goals like “get that promotion”),
- experience goals (how I want to feel while I’m using your website, “don’t want to feel stupid”, “want to feel confident”), and
- end goals (what I want to accomplish, a tangible outcome, “find the best vendor”, “understand this subject”).
Life goals are less important for buyer personas. What’s important is to capture both experience goals and end goals, how the visitor feels while using the site and whether the visitor is accomplishing the task.
Personas are represented as individuals. They are models of buyers represented as specific, individual persons. Models of individuals are much more likely to engage the empathy of your team.
Personas are a research tool and a communication tool. Creating personas is only the first step. The next step is to communicate the personas to the members of your development team in a way that they know these personas like they know a friend or colleague. Writing a narrative of each persona brings them to life.
Personas enable a group to get past personal opinions and understand what visitors really want. Instead of circular discussions about what each person on the team thinks visitors want, personas enable the group to reach consensus around the goals and behavior of each persona.
Personas need to be specific, memorable, and actionable. It doesn’t help the team if they are vague or stereotypes like “Joe SixPack”. They have to be specific so that the team will develop a picture of a particular person. They need to have a narrative that is memorable so that each member of the team can carry the understanding of the persona with them. Finally, they need to be actionable. The narrative needs to describe a the goals and behavior of a persona that helps your group to make design and implementation decisions.
In my next post I’ll describe the process that marketers use to create buyer personas.
Some other related posts you might find useful:
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