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It’s a struggle for any company to reach the right market for their products and services. How do you know what type of person will want to use what you’re selling? How do you find the right tools to market your service specifically to those people? And how do you know if your efforts were fruitful in the end? One process that can be applied to answer these questions is called persona building. A persona, simply put, is an easy-to-navigate dossier that describes a typical user or group of users. It is a detailed biography of existing or imagined customers. Building these personas can help you identify, cater to, and gather feedback from the customers who will find your product or service the most useful.

Many companies approach user profiling with little more than unfounded assumptions about user’s needs and actions. They believe that they “know” how users think, or can predict their behavior. Avoid this kind of conjecture. A truly effective persona will be based on concrete data and actual user profiles; it should be much more than baseless suppositions about their needs. Do the research, compile the data, and use that information as the skeleton for a user profile. You can organize this information in much the same way you would format a resume or CV. The skeleton profile can include sections on your user’s objectives, educational and occupational backgrounds, favorite activities, skills and abilities, and even shortcomings. Adding personal details, photos, even sound and video files (a theoretical subject’s favorite song, for example), will flesh out the picture, making your persona as human as you and me.

One mistake that businesses often make it to create just one user profile for each product or service. This can control your marketing efforts and restrict freedom and success. There are many different “standard” users for every product. For a high-volume website, for example, it would be advisable to create many personas, each of which are representative of a portion of your user-base. This is especially true if your product or service will reach a diverse or even international audience.

Another common mistake that is made is “over-doing” the persona. The profile you create should match your the type of customers that you actually have - nothing more and nothing less. Incorrectly identifying them will lead to decisions that will impact your business and the type of applications your trying to build. Missing a group of people could mean that certain features are not available or may not be easy to use. Identifying someone who does not fit with your audience could result in the addition of features that no one will use, and it will scuttle the user experience.

Below are two brief examples of personas for two different users of Talkibie:

User A - Karen Fielding

Background info: Karen is a graphic designer with a local firm in the Phoenix, AZ area. She is good at her job, but she has not had any professional development classes in a while. She is largely self-taught, and she tries to keep up with trends and technology by reading blogs and online training documentation. She finds her coworkers are younger and younger, and she’s trying to stay ahead of the new talent in her field.

About Karen: She is in her mid-30s, and she’s very socially active with friends and coworkers. She likes to visit museums and galleries, and she considers her work to be an art-form. She uses the internet mainly for work to keep up with email, but she’s computer savvy and quick to pick up new skills.

What she values: Intelligence, efficiency, and a sense of humor.

Quote: “I like a website that’s informative and entertaining.”

User B - Dan DiMaggio

Background info: Dan is the CEO of a staffing firm which serves 3 states in the Northeast. His job entails managing a staff of 150, and they’re always suggesting ways to improve the company’s reputation through web-based technology. He’s great at the business-side of his job, but he’s lost when it comes to technology solutions.

About Dan: He’s in his 50s, and he’s been with the same company for 25 years. He loves managing his staff, and they like and respect him. However, he’s so clueless about computers that he has his assistant print out his emails each morning so that he can draft replies by hand. He wants to learn how to do these things, but it seems like no one has the patience to teach him.

What he values: Loyalty, hard work, customer satisfaction

Quote: “How can I approve new website functions when I can’t even figure out how to sign on to the internet?”

These two very different Talkibie readers have very different levels of experience and backgrounds, but after creating profiles of this type it’s easy to anticipate their needs. Dan would need a very simple interface which features instructive articles written so that anyone could understand the topic being presented. Karen, on the other hand, would want a slick-looking site where she can read about the latest trends and how to implement them in her regular workflow . Karen would be the type of user to give back to the online community by posting comments and questions on blogs, where as Dan would be more absorbent, looking for information rather than creating dialogue, and he’d probably want it in a printable format. A solid persona includes not just age, gender, and buying habits, but also less-tangible characteristics like experience-level, values, and attitudes.

The key to serving a diverse audience with any product is to actually get to know them and attempt to address their needs. Predicting this information can prove invaluable when it comes to designing an application or product tailored to your personas. If, for example, you know that a significant portion of your target audience is blind or disabled, you can maximize the accessibility of your application or service with careful design that allows your users to function at their peak. This would include strategies such as keeping content simple and organized so screen reading software can be effectual, including captioning options with multimedia portions of your site, allowing keyboard commands as an alternative to mouse-driven content, and enabling your user to control style sheets for maximum readability. If your target audience tends to be under 25, you can consider integrating social networking widgets for a customizable interface, or allowing each user to create a personalized profile for your site. A good user experience is the most obvious benefit of carefully crafting personas before beginning design. At the end of the day, the aim is to create a design for your customers that makes it feel as though it was built specifically for them, regardless of their various backgrounds. Having solid personas up front is key in reaching that goal.

But forget what the textbooks say about consumer profiles. When you create a persona, you should be creating an imaginary friend. Unlike when you were four, this imaginary friend should not be named Bongo or want to tip your milk cup over the kitty cat just to see what she’ll do. No, this imaginary friend should resemble your clients, your ideal clients. You should know this persona well enough to predict how he/she will use your services or products, and they should be an “easy sell” for your idea. Your persona’s motivations and abilities should become second nature to you. You’ll know before it happens that the milk cup is about to be overturned. And if you like, you still can name your persona Bongo.

Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 Both comments and pings are currently closed.

By Haley January Eckels