What is a Persona?
Customer Persona Development is a term used in User Experience design whereby users are transformed from numbers to people through context. By looking at the professions, ages, and other demographics of website users, we can delve into the different types of people and investigate scenarios of when they use a particular website.
Why Use Them?
In market research, the information usually obtained is “48% of users purchased a subscription in November 2013”. What quantitative research lacks is the ability to understand users’ motivations behind why they have decided to purchase a subscription, but more importantly why the remaining 52% did not go ahead and purchase a subscription. By generating User Personas we look beyond the statistics, we delve into the behaviours of specific users, we think about their attitudes, how technology savvy they are, whether they use social media, and most importantly their goals and motivations of using the website. In this example, market research adequately concludes that 52% of users are not completing their subscription purchase, but by finding out why just one person dropped out the process, we might be able to decrease this 52% to a much smaller number, as other users may have shared a similar experience. By improving the user journey, we can help increase conversion rates.
Costs and Benefits.
The hardest thing about creating personas is convincing clients who are unfamiliar and perhaps sceptical about the exercise. The most effective personas are made when there is a positive interaction between the UX expert and the client; the UX professional brings in their expertise, while the client brings vital knowledge. Although the client may not know that much about their customers (you’d be surprised how little companies know about their users), they know certain demographics e.g. ages, professions. Through developing personas you beginto build an image in your head of who these users are, giving them a name helps translate them from just a statistic into an actual person. At first clients may not understand the point of the exercise, however, 99% of the time they will leave the persona workshop feeling like they learnt a lot about their users. Once you’ve succeeded this initial bump you can reap the benefits. Creating effective personas is the springboard to achieving the goal at the end of the process. Why? Because we can develop a prototype with the user firmly in mind. Firstly think about “Sam” and the journey he might take to purchase an Xbox on eBay, you then see the barriers and problems he may face and later develop a prototype which hopes to improve this journey for Sam. During the development of the prototype you can then refer back to your personas; you can recruit someone who fits “Sam” and see how he finds the original user journey compared to the new prototype journey.
Creating Customer Personas ensures the designer is developing a website/product with the user in mind. Generating personas is a quick, cheap, and effective task, and is one of the most important elements in the UX design process.
