Creating personas
In Part One and Part Two of this series I introduced the idea of buyer personas. In this post we’ll look at how to create personas and use them for website development.
The process of creating your personas is part analysis and part synthesis. You analyze the characteristics of people who visit your site, sort and group characteristics that are similar, and synthesize these characteristics into specific fictional characters that represent your buying audience.
It’s possible for your website to resemble a person-to-person selling environment even though it is a faceless medium. It can do this by using personas to accommodate the needs of different types of visitors who come to your site.
The process to develop personas includes these steps: build a hypothesis, gather information, assemble and synthesize, and finally develop a narrative.
Build a hypothesis
Build a hypothesis of your personas. You already know a lot about who your customers are, who visits your site, and their roles in their company. Use this information to build a hypothesis of different personas. If you sell enterprise software, you might start with a hypothesis about the CIO, project managers, and a software architect. If you are a bank selling treasury services, it might be the CFO, directors and staff in the Treasury department.
Gather information
Gather information about the characteristics of people who visit your site. Some of this information is readily available from your customer service logs, history and anecdotes from the sales staff, and website analytics. You can get additional information from interviews and surveys. I’ve found interviews to be especially effective because I can dig deeper into subjects that are revealing important characteristics.
Assemble and synthesize
Assemble your information into groupings of similar characteristics. Look for clusters of behavior patterns.
Synthesize these clusters of characteristics and goals into specific personas. Plan to create three to five personas.
Develop a narrative
Develop a narrative that quickly introduces each persona in terms of his/her job (for business personas) or lifestyle (for consumer personas). Briefly sketch a typical day in the life of this persona, including interests and concerns that are relevant to your website. Include in the narrative the kinds of questions you would expect this persona to ask while visiting your site.
The persona is a protagonist that is seeking to accomplish its goals. The narrative should be a robust story line that describes this story from beginning to end. As the Eisenberg’s explain,
The narrative is filled with descriptions of how the protagonists begin their buying processes: whom they are talking to, what they are thinking and feeling, what they encounter when they visit you and your competitors. It accounts for all possible interactions across all possible channels.
Because this process includes analysis and synthesis, your group will have arrived at a consensus of these personas by the end of the process. This will create more useful and credible personas and it will fix them in the minds of your group. The personas will come to seem like “real people” in the minds of your team members. Everyone on your team will be imagining the same person.
Having a clear picture of each persona, their goals and how they would behave, is what makes personas actionable. At any point in the design and development of your website, members of the team can ask themselves, “What would Mary do at this point? What question would be on Tom’s mind right now?” Answers to these questions guide the team’s next action.
In the next and final post in this series, I’ll give you a template you can use to create your personas.
Comments on this entry are closed.