User personas to focus the design phase on what really matters: use

Creation of Web and User Personas

Akendi follows an established process to identify and develop personas for web sites, products, services, organizations and brands. We take user personas research as a first step in the creation of effective designs. Part of this step is the study of your target audience: the user. For a typical web site, product or service you usually have between 2-8 persona definitions. They are not “average” users but specific characters with names, personalities, faces, personal backgrounds, families and, most importantly, usage goals.

Research and analysis of User, Product and Web personas

A persona is a stand-in or proxy for a unique group of people who share common goals and needs with respect to the use of a product , website or service (the experience). Each persona has a link to user research data that is based on primary user research (field research: contextual inquiry, job observation). At the same time, persona characteristics can encompass those people in widely different demographic groups who do have similar goals. This differentiates usually the personas from a market segment, psychographic or demographic; what defines personas are the common usage goals.

Different types of personas

We develop user personas, organization personas, customer personas, service personas, etc. These personas are created to help focus the design of an experience. This is done through;

1. reminding the creators of the experience that they themselves are not the target audience and

2. that design options and decisions need to be reviewed and validated by putting the target audience personas front and center. In the end it is these personas that need to make the purchase decision, recommend the product or get the right information to complete a task.
   

Personas Research Approach

Usually there is a some knowledge inside an organization already about who the users are, what they do and what the context of use is for these users. And if the organization hasn’t done any external user research yet or the project boundaries don’t allow for a greater effort , it is recommended to start with the internal stakeholders of the project to create personas. Sometimes the relevant user research information is anecdotal in nature, not really captured in a more formal way or quite dispersed among various people in the organization.

Personas workshop

So to tease out that existing knowledge requires a number of interviews or workshop sessions with individuals that have (had) experience in client facing roles. Client facing includes both outside customers/users of the service or product , but inside to the organization as well . For example: front desk staff, support staff, managers, web managers, content matter experts, (internal) consultants, outreach, marketing and sales staff. In an interview or workshop session, we would star t with the question: ‘who, in your view, are your users?’ and from there star t to capture and build the overview of all personas that can or should be distinguished for the purposes of the design. After an initial inventory, we could end up with 25 distinct personas after which we will narrow it down to a more manageable number by determining how different the usage goals are of each persona and why it is important to distinguish that particular persona. In a workshop session we would use a mix of group discussion and small group exercises to arrive at the desired outcome.

Personas Capture

The gathered information is captured in a way to promote integration of the results in the design. At minimum in PowerPoint slides, but this can also range from a large poster, pages on the intranet to life size presentations or other fitting means to make all stakeholders aware of the insights. An important part of this activity is to stimulate the ongoing communication among stakeholders regarding the end users. After the interviews and/or workshops, it can be determined if the validity of the information is high enough to go to the design phase or whether there is a need for additional ethnographic and field research.

Contact Us

Contact us for more information: t: +1 416 855-3367 e: business@akendi.com m: 187 King Street East, 4th floor, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Web personas and customer personas definition research for companies globally: Canada, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Calgary, Edmonton; San Francisco, San Jose, CA; Boston, MA; Chicago; London, UK; Amsterdam; New York, NY.