“If like many great goals, the success of yours is dependent upon a positive response or reaction from other people, then you have to get to know them. That’s where user personas enter the scene” ~ The Power of Personas
Woman listening to a customer
Personas are all about customer intelligence. That is collecting and analyzing data about people in order to better relate to and serve them over time. Information is collected by applying various methods for listening to and learning about those users. Data sources may include web analytics, user surveys, observation, etc.
For teams, personas enable everyone to maintain a common, universal understanding of the primary customer types being served. In turn, customers benefit by finding more products and services that are best suited to their specific goals, and develop greater confidence in and trust towards the team or organization. The question you should be asking now is, how can my department begin benefiting from user personas in order to better relate to and serve our customers?
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The ROI of Personas
Organizations can choose to invest in personas for a single, unique product/service case or maximize their potential by distributing them enterprise-wide for all departments and teams. The latter formula, enables every member of the organization to sync up their comprehension of customers and work to meet more goals with critical clarity. Marketers, researchers, designers, developers, sales professionals, customer support and education specialists, leaders, and stakeholders can all experience performance improvements with the help of personas. This is because every role within an organization provides some resource that ultimately serves, and can therefore be optimized through greater understanding of, its customers.
“Personas help to focus decisions surrounding site components by adding a layer of real-world consideration to the conversation. They also offer a quick and inexpensive way to test and prioritize those features throughout the development process,” (Usability.gov).
Using and Benefiting from Personas
Increased understanding of users will enable you to refine messages and raise user experience standards both online and in-person. Consequently, awareness, loyalty, and engagement efforts can be optimized for both current and new clients.
Pro Tip: If you’re working with a UX (i.e. user experience) researcher to develop personas for a particular product, then be sure to explain where you are in the development process, so that they can adopt the most valid and reliable research method for the current stage of production.
“Personas are primarily developed to help determine where there are opportunities and areas for improvement in a website or application’s experience. This can guide the feature set and validate your UI design decisions. You may also find value in sharing your persona data with web marketing teams to apply to A/B tests and email campaigns, your web analytics team, customer service / sales organization and even to guide your personalization strategy,” (GetElastic.com).
10 Ways to Use Personas Right off the Bat
- Use their unique lingo for everything from presentations to products
- Write text content (e.g. e-book, blog articles) tailored to specific personas
- Create video content tailored to your audiences and their questions or needs
- Optimize your landing pages and overall websites for client persona expectations
- Create dynamic pages and websites that are custom-made for specific client personas
- Learn how to consistently, connect with customers where they are in reality and online
- Rapidly test and improve old products using accurate behavioral data from user personas
- Use them to train new employees on customers just as much as on brand, goods, and resources
- Unite marketing, development, & service sector teams around common customer concepts & goals
- Consistently, build innovative business tools and services based on current demand trends from customers
Team Benefiting from Personas and Customer Intelligence
Example of Persona
- Demographic and socioeconomic
- Age, gender, income bracket, etc.
- Education and profession
- Level of education, certificates, job title
- Skills and resources
- Hardware, software, familiarity with relevant tools
- Goals and needs
- Online and in-person expectations, and objectives
- Wants, interests, and hobbies
- Extracurricular activities, community involvement, and secondary goals
Example of Persona provided by Extensio.com
How Companies Optimize Their Investments in Personas
Personas act like a magnet and attract clients
Every individual is distinct but our similarities are often most apparent when we examine our behaviors, motivations, and behavior patterns. Individuals and companies that have a strong commitment to understanding those patterns can begin to build better relationships with current customers. Better yet, they can more rapidly discover new, receptive audiences and begin to attract new customers. This, the ability to retain the old and attract the new, is a key factor in sustainable business growth. But remember personas are based on real people, who often progress and change (e.g. goals, skills, interests, expectations, etc.) over time. So in order to optimize any investment in them, personas must be kept up-to-date.
“Personas should be updated frequently. Innovation and competition may significantly shift the attitudes and behaviors of a company’s customers. In order to keep personas current, companies should maintain a consistent dialogue with customers and commit to maintaining the personas as living and breathing documents. Communicating new user research and updating the personas accordingly is critical,” (UXMag.com).
Teams, Using Personas to Improve
Teams across the globe are already seeing the benefits of using personas for their businesses. For example, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (i.e. MTBA) noted that, “Defining a persona forces you to think about who you are solving for, what their challenges are when using your product, and what they are trying to accomplish,” (Medium.com). As a result their team has been able to better organize their business processes and develop a clearer picture of their large and diverse customer base. They took advantage of their data to create personas that provided essential order and clarity within the organization.
In another case involving Ocado Technology, team members were eager to start using personas right away in order to lift the veil on what was unknown and begin to really start thinking like a customer. As one of the world’s largest online-only grocery retailers, Ocado found personas to be a huge boon to their business. In the word of one product owner, “I first realized that the team had fully adopted personas when I heard them discussing a feature request: ‘This would never work for Luke’ or ‘You think like a Robert!’. Another day someone declared that his shopping was delivered by ‘an Albert’. Straight after that someone else came to me with ‘a solution for Albert’s problem’, which is now discussed in meetings mentioning Albert on the agenda! It really pays off to keep thinking about the users all the time,” (MindtheProduct.com).
From the MTBA based in Boston to London’s Ocado Technology team, personas have clearly had a positive impact on enterprise operations and business to customer relations. Now, what’s your story going to be? You can connect with USF Health Information Systems to learn more about your customers and your growth potential with personas, today.
Happy Computing!
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