In the previous three posts (here, here, and here) I explained how buyer personas work to improve the persuasiveness of your website and how to create a persona. In this final post you’ll see how to use a template to create each persona.

Remember, these buyer personas are representations of goal-directed individuals with different personalities, roles, and behaviors. As you and your team look at each completed persona, a sense of a real person should emerge, a person whose needs you will know how to address on each page of your site.

The way I use this template is to create a spreadsheet with the template categories in one column and then place the information for each of the personas (three to five) in the other columns. This lets everyone on the team see all the personas side by side. I’ve put an example in the second column of a persona we used once on a project for a software development company.

At the bottom of this post are links to a couple of resources on buyer personas that you might find useful. If you’d like a copy of the Excel template that I use, email me and I’ll send it to you.

Buyer Persona Template

Resource to learn more about buyer personas:

The User Is Always Right – A Practical Guide to Creating and Using Personas for the Web – Steve Mulder with Ziv Yaar

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.

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.

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. 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.