Geonexus

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.

Website conversion improvements are like a long-lasting love affair

The one-second survey

Tough love for startups from Sequoia Capital

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.

Doctors consistently rank at the top of the list when pollsters ask the question: “Which profession do you trust the most?”

Can we learn something from how they do business?

First, let’s imagine this situation:
You have had a pain in your chest for a couple of days now and you decide to go to the doctor. You make an appointment and arrive on time. After a few minutes in the waiting room, the nurse shows you into an examination room.

After a few more minutes the doctor walks in. She immediately launches into a description of the various treatment options she offers and why they are better than the alternatives. After completing her explanation, she leaves you with her business card and some pamphlets that further describe her treatments.

Inconceivable, isn’t it? A doctor who asks no questions, doesn’t take a history, performs no diagnostic tests.

Yet this is exactly what happens when visitors (patients) land on the web site of many companies (the doctor). Visitors may not even be sure that they have a problem before the web site is describing the merits of its product and why it’s better than the other guy’s.

How could it be different?

A web site could let the visitor perform a self-diagnosis and then direct the visitor to pages relevant to the diagnostic questions. For visitors that aren’t knowledgeable about the area where they have a problem, the site could point them to pages that educate. For visitors that are thinking about the treatment you offer (your product or service), the site could provide lots of detail about how it works, who has used it in the past, and the results they got.

Doctors are trained to be aware of where the patient is in their journey toward solving a problem. If the patient is at the beginning of their journey, the doctor starts there. If the patient is further along, then the doctor helps patients evaluate treatment options or what to expect when the treatment is done.

The point is that the doctor is constantly going back and forth between focus on the patient’s journey and the diagnostic/treatment process.

It’s possible to design web sites that take this approach, but only when owners of sites turn their attention to focus both on their treatment (sales) process and on the patient’s (visitor’s) journey.

A big reason we trust doctors is that they seem to genuinely be interested in helping us to solve our problem. Can your website do the same thing for your visitors and future customers?

Stephen Pinker dispels two of the myths about Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential debate performance in today’s New York Times (Everything You Heard Is Wrong). He persuasively argues that she didn’t successfully survive a trial by fire, as her supporters suggest. Nor does her accent betray naïveté, as her detractors would like to think. The column is worth a read.

Conversation and debate

But this post is not about Sarah Palin. It’s about an observation of Pinker’s on conversation versus debate.

Pinker was explaining the difference between the requirements of a debate and the requirements of a conversation. In a debate format, like last Thursday with the moderator sitting thirty feet away and the television cameras rolling, it’s acceptable to change the subject or not even answer the question. You can get by with a sentence like this one from Palin in response to Gwen Ifill’s question about the bailout package in Congress:

You know, I think a good barometer here, as we try to figure out has this been a good time or a bad time in America’s economy, is go to a kid’s soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, “How are you feeling about the economy?

Huh? What did she say? We don’t know, but somehow it worked in the debate format.

But in a conversation the sentence above would make no sense. In a conversation you are sitting directly across from the other person only a few feet away. Each of you is responding directly to the other, or the conversation dies. The response above would be baffling.

Here’s how Pinker describes it: “In a conversation, you have to build your sentence phrase by phrase, monitoring the reaction of your listener, while aiming for relevance to the question.”

Conversational web pages

Pinker’s observation about conversation made me think of web pages, especially web pages in a site that is meant to persuade. Although pages on a persuasive website aren’t actually a conversation, we write them as though we are in an imaginary conversation with the reader. We write them by picturing a particular visitor or persona reading a sentence or paragraph, then asking a question, and then writing to respond to the question.

When this visitor reads paragraphs that are self-serving and written as though the page is from thirty feet away, the visitor quickly tunes out.

A visitor is much more likely to be drawn into a page if it is written in a way that builds sentence by sentence, that seems to be monitoring the visitor’s response, and that is aiming for relevance to the visitor’s question.

Writing conversationally

How to write pages that are conversational and persuasive?

Write to a particular person. You can imagine a real person if you want, or create a persona that represents a profile of one of your typical visitors. The Eisenberg’s have written extensively on the use personas here, here, and here.

Write to a particular set of questions. Brainstorm the questions you would expect a visitor to have about the subject on the page, then address all those questions. You want to write in a way that you are monitoring the response of your imaginary visitor, anticipating their questions or objections, and responding to them in a way that the visitor finds relevant.