Persona Development
Often when I talk to startups about their product vision, feature roadmap or growth challenges, I hear lot of customer behavioral assumptions built into the product thinking. Examples range from as simple as “Everyone has 100+ apps on their phone now” to stereo-typing like “Business executives are not hands-on” to as convincing as “There’s no way anyone will not want offers.”. I like it when founders are passionate about ideas and bets, but it is important to avoid falling into the trap of building for someone-like-this-might-exist user. The most-asked and the most-ignored question is “who are you building for?”
To avoid ignoring this question, putting a human face (or persona) to your customer is very important.
A persona represents a cluster of users who exhibit similar behavioral patterns in their purchasing decisions, use of technology or products, customer service preferences, lifestyle choices, and the like. Behaviors, attitudes, and motivations are common to a “type” regardless of age, gender, education, and other typical demographics. In fact, personas vastly span demographics.
When developing personas, you want to:
Talk to a wide base of target users
Speak to internal people as well — customer service is on the front lines with your customers, but are often overlooked as a source of information about users.
Sales, marketing, available research
Pull these themes together, and assign a character to represent a theme. You don’t want too many, but you do want to prioritize them — which personas have the most weight or influence. You may have 2–3 primary personas, and a few secondary personas. Persona definition includes name + nice picture, identifying quote, narrative describing who the persona is, questions in persona’s own terms, end goals, experience goals among others.
Personas are a living thing — should evolve, be updated ongoing. Invite them to meetings (really).
Keep answering this question “If we don’t make _____ ridiculously happy, we’ve failed.” Personas help the team focus on clear goals and needs. They also help build consensus where there is disagreement. Keep them at the table — literally — during meetings; consider them part of the team. Have members of the team ‘assume’ a persona to help think through an issue or problem. How would Jane, the marketing lead react to a feature? Use personas to test assumptions — set up test cases, interview real users to see if assumptions are correct.
Some great reading material about personas and scenarios
http://uxmag.com/articles/personas-the-foundation-of-a-great-user-experience
The Essential Persona Lifecycle, Tamara Adlin & John Pruitt