The right persona for the job
When it comes to designing or re-designing a website, getting some of your customers involved in the process is essential. But instead of using real customers, it may be better to make them up, as Simon van Wyk writes.
How well do you really know your customers? Do you know the most important ones by name, where they live, what their attitudes are toward your company and your products or services? If you knew some of them that well, would it make a difference to the way you design your product/service, your marketing campaign, your website?
I think most marketers would agree that the answer to that last question is yes. Most marketing depends on intimate knowledge of customer types and customer groups, but not of individual customers themselves. There are excellent reasons why you don’t get down to that level of knowledge, the main one being that any single customer is bound to have some idiosyncrasies that would skew the results of marketing campaign design. No customer can be typical enough to design an entire campaign - or website - around.
But a new type of framework for Internet design has arisen that turns that sort of thinking inside out. Appropriately enough in an era of cloning and computer simulations, it involves “creating” a typical customer from scratch. The concept, called personas, is revolutionising website design overseas, and is likely to soon have a strong impact in Australia.
Simply put, personas are detailed descriptions of user archetypes that represent market segments - a composite description of a real person who represents a primary customer segment. These personas are then used to drive website designs and changes.
Educating Reba
Personas are built following interviews conducted with representative customers from each of a business’s key target segments. A profile of the persona is created that treats this archetype as a full-blooded person, with a name, gender, family history, personality, attitude, even a photograph - although the person is totally fictional.
The concept was developed by software designer Wayne Cooper, who started out play-acting how a particular user would interact with a software program. He wrote a best-selling business book he Inmates Are Running the Asylum in 1998 in which he describes how personas work for interactive design. The book “was intended to alert managers to the problems inherent in designing software for use by non-engineers,” according to Cooper.
It doesn’t sound like rocket science - that’s because it isn’t, although as Wayne Cooper says, “Personas, like all powerful tools, can be grasped in an instant but can take months or years to master.”
Forrester Research in the US has championed the use of personas in Website design. Forrester analyst John Dalton says, “Personas must provoke a sense of empathy for the design team. Personas must therefore have the attributes of a real person, such as name, face, age, job, home address, family, and ambitions.” Dalton adds that a key feature is a ‘day in the life’ vignette of the persona, including their interaction with the company’s web presence.
It’s important to limit the number of personas you use to two or three types representing only the key customer segments - and to create a persona who represents the toughest customer in that segment.
Forrester analyst Harley Manning writes that “Sites created for everyone are doomed to satisfy no one. By designing primarily for the most-demanding personas, design teams can develop focused scenarios that please the most-demanding users without disappointing the rest.”
Forrester’s Bruce Temkin says personas limit the focus of design, but “that’s exactly what they’re supposed to do. Design efforts that try to satisfy all customers produce interfaces so dense with controls, content, and function that even expert users struggle to manage them. Design personas… empower design teams to focus their energies on essential content and function.”
“Design personas,” Temkin says, “help companies make informed, fast design decisions. By creating a shared, vivid picture of target customers’ behaviours, project teams can better evaluate how to satisfy customer needs.
“The impact is less scope creep from unwanted and unnecessary features, faster consensus across the team, and none of the pitfalls from self-referential design. Rather than suffering through endless debates about design priorities, teams can settle disputes with a pointed question: ‘What would Reba want?’”
Kim Goodwin, design director at Cooper Design, says a key difference between a persona and a customer type is that “Personas represent behaviour patterns, not job descriptions.”
Bruce Temkin says, “Designing a marketing campaign is different than designing a Web site or an IVR interface: people just absorb a message, but they interact with a system. Marketing-centric customer profiles suggest the promise to make to customers. Personas reveal how to build an interactive system that delivers on that promise.”
Painting scenarios
Forrester has dubbed the process of applying personas to particular situations to test a website “scenario design”. It asserts that scenario design can have a demonstrated financial impact on business websites. As Harley Manning says, “Ecommerce integrators with the expertise to create personas and designs based on scenarios will have an easier time showing ROI for their designs.”
Manning points out that knowing your customer segments well is a prerequisite for building personas and conducting scenario design. “Many firms still lack the critical user information necessary for successful scenario design.”
John Dalton agrees, saying, “The primary is the persona that poses the most stringent constraints on the design - he’s the toughest customer to please. But designer beware: If the team can’t identify a primary, then the project is in trouble. Failure to locate a primary means that either the application is trying to do too many things at once or the research has failed to collect sufficient data regarding customer attitudes and goals.”
John Dalton agrees, saying, “The primary is the persona that poses the most stringent constraints on the design - he’s the toughest customer to please. But designer beware: If the team can’t identify a primary, then the project is in trouble. Failure to locate a primary means that either the application is trying to do too many things at once or the research has failed to collect sufficient data regarding customer attitudes and goals.”
He asks, “Why do companies shy away from investing in these essential tools? They fear that they’ll lose customers if they don’t anticipate and satisfy every potential goal for each of their users, they fret that they’ll pick people who aren’t typical, and the pressure to show return on investment is high.”
But, he concludes, “None of these objections holds water. Site managers could make faster, better decisions through a deeper understanding of users’ online behaviour, technical expertise, and detailed goals - the kind of understanding that personas provide.
“Valid personas reduce work while saving both time and money over the course of a project because they serve the most important market segments, they simplify design decisions, and they help avoid costly rework.”
Simon van Wyk is managing director of marketing technology company HotHouse Interactive.
Websites with more information on personas and scenario design:
Forrester Research: http://www.forrester.com
Cooper Design: http://www.cooper.com