Love this article on Personas and how we’re using them today. We could do so much better.
The Art Of Personas
WHAT DO CUSTOMERS REALLY WANT?
The concept of personas is at an odd crossroads right now. For a variety of reasons, the need to develop personas is at an all-time high for both B2B and B2C organizations alike. Simultaneously, there’s this bubbling (and baffling) idea that simply developing personas is a silver bullet to hitting the mark every time.
These are our two key takeaways directly from “The State of the Art of Personas,” a February 2013 Forrester Research report that’s worth reading by any organization that wants to ensure that it’s not simply guessing and hoping about what its customers need. The author, Senior Analyst Jonathan Browne, says: “Recently, shortsighted firms have wrongly dismissed personas as passé. But firms need tools for sharing customer understanding now more than ever. That’s because design challenges have become more complex than ever, spanning the channels and business silos that customers pass through on their journeys.”
Browne is right on the money. As we learned from our work with one of the world’s largest insurance companies, customers’ personas change as their needs change throughout their journey. For example, our policyholder interviews identified two major personas: one representing individuals more self-directed, price-sensitive and interested in the insurer’s online tools for selecting and managing policies, and a second with a preference for working more directly with the insurer’s agent.
But our research also revealed that customers’ personas morphed as insurance needs changed. For example, we found that the self-directed and price-sensitive persona quickly preferred the assistance of an insurance agent when faced with larger and more complex product purchases and use situations. Why the switch? Major events such as a totaled car or the biggest purchase of a lifetime prompted them to seek new types of sales and support channels that better met their needs at that moment.
Those kinds of insights were key for helping the insurance company empathize with its customers—to the point that it’s now better able to meet their needs even as they evolve. We cemented that empathy by putting faces on each persona via life-size cardboard cutouts rather than simply providing a slide deck with bullets describing their attributes.
Empathy is key for ensuring that clients actually use their persona research on a daily basis rather than simply tacking it to their cubicle walls and forgetting about it. It’s equally important to keep the client stakeholders in the loop every step of the way.
As Forrester’s report explains, Manifest “used a standard set of presentation materials to inform stakeholders about progress in the persona development process, explain the research approaches being used, and outline the next steps. This helped stakeholders understand the multiphase approach to developing personas and provided input from the perspective of the business. An advantage to this participatory approach is that stakeholders have confidence in the validity of personas when the time comes to use them.”
Although personas are often pigeonholed as a B2C strategy, they’re equally valuable for B2B. If we look at our work with telecom and cloud computing providers, we see a pretty diverse group of personas: The CFO, for instance, will focus on how cloud computing enables the company to shift its infrastructure from a CapEx to OpEx model, while the CIO is interested in whether the cloud incurs tradeoffs in reliability and security. Personas are key for understanding the needs of each type of person who specifies, evaluates and authorizes a major purchase, as well as their expectations about support after the sale.
Ultimately, personas are the starting point in a journey toward products, services, sales channels, kiosks, mobile apps and everything else that businesses provide to their customers. And the best personas provide the deep, actionable insights that inspire companies to come up with innovative ways to address their customers’ motivations and frustrations.
Dig deeper into personas with Brian Winters’s Webinar, “Real-Time Personas” on October 22nd. Click here to register!
Jason is a crazed evangelist for user experience design, accosting strangers with sermons on its value in solving business and social problems. He’s a leader in the experience design practice at Manifest Digital, Co-Founder of UX for Good, and serves as an adjunct faculty member in the HCI Masters program at DePaul University.
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