Today’s world is always chasing personalization. Previously, Personas were limited to simple segmentation, e.g., age and gender. Thanks to the development and deeper understanding of the subject as in the case of True Personas, content and service providers can increasingly engage clients based on new technologies. A more personalized approach to content and services directly affects the overall customer experience.
Personas represents a group of users focused on shared behavior, motivations, goals, pain points or other characteristics. Personas help keep key user groups in the first place when making product decisions. Effective Personas are created on the basis of research to ensure that they reflect the real people who use your product. They resemble categories of people who help keep users at the center of the design process, without having to remember hundreds or even thousands of behaviors, motivations and goals of individual people.
Personas does not represent one specific user, but rather a synthesis of many users who have attributes that are significant to your process.
What Customer Personas really are?
The largest corporations in their positions have a problem and do not understand the concerns and motivations of their clients. This is an argument for using a tool such as client personas based on data and tests seems obvious. In essence, the persons are fictitious representations of buyer segments based on real data reflecting their behavior. Their goal is to get people to make decisions in the eyes of the client. The problem with many personas is that they rely on irrelevant data, poorly obtained data or no data at all. Although some basic demographic data, such as gender and age, may apply, other very specific characteristics collected from research or anecdotes are useless.
Why Use Personas?
Now that we have an understanding of what personas are, let’s talk about how they can make your design and development process easier. We use personas to help us build better products by understanding our users and designing for their needs. Personas capture a large number of users and highlight information about them that’s key to making meaningful decisions about your products. They help you better understand the real people who use your product. Beyond title or role, personas provide insight into users’ work behaviors, and the tools they use to get their jobs done.
What A Customer Personas Looks Like
Client’s Personas can take many forms, but finally their usefulness lies in how effectively they are able to create a clear picture of what drives different types of buyers of your products or services. Although there are many templates and examples to follow on the Internet, think about personality modeling from available qualitative and quantitative research, focusing on:
- behavioral drivers – they cover your clients’ goals, what they want to achieve, their journey to find your company.
- Obstacles in the purchase – take into account the fluctuations and concerns of customers. How do they perceive your product or service and how they affect the amount of information needed to make a decision?
- Mindset – Your clients come to shopping with expectations and preconceived notions. Are these customers who want emotions related to the transaction or expect a more sophisticated experience? The sale of a slimming program will be more emotionally charged than, say, the sale of routers.
Providing people’s names and faces is less important than ensuring that they are based on real people and not on stereotypes.
Characteristics of a good personas
This is a checklist of what makes a good persona. As a group, we agreed on the following criteria:
- They reflect patterns observed in research
- They focus on the current state, not the future
- Realistic
- Help you understand users’
- Context
- Behaviors
- Attitudes
- Needs
- Challenges/pain points
- Goals and motivations
For each persona, we pointed out what was good and what we could improve about the way they were constructed. From there, it was time to make our case to the business.
Shaping of your Personas
First you have to start by asking questions to understand not only the different segments that make up the customer base, but also what motivates them
Some of the most valuable ways to do this are:
– Customer surveys – Conducting online or offline surveys with open questions is crucial to understanding how your customers determine their motivations and needs. The goal is to reach the client’s head to make sure that your people are based on what real people think, not just what they think. Consider about 10 questions designed to get the best insights on the basis of behavioral factors, obstacles to buying and thinking. Depending on the company, the questions will be different. But the end goal is always the same – receiving useful information that serves your needs.
– Telephone and personal interviews – Chatting with existing clients can provide valuable information about shopping habits, their motivations and the words they use to describe a product or service. When conducting interviews that can be labor-intensive, the answers can be informative. You can go back and ask your respondents to develop, and detailed information is not available in the surveys.
– Internet and outgoing questionnaires – the question to be asked depends on the overall purpose. Do you want to know if your site or products on your site meet your needs? Or maybe you want to understand what potential sources of friction are stopping customers from buying? Experiment with your question to see how many answers and answers you get thanks to insight.
Personas customer is a tool. All the tools are as good as the people who use them. They can provide a great insight into how to create better user experiences, convincing copies or pricing models. The key is to isolate them from the data that serves the goals you want to achieve.
Remember that Personas are a synthesis of many users and reflect the features of real people, not stereotypes with their real motivations, desires and fears. If you stop focusing on people, your Personas will be fake and will not bring the expected results.
