How to create Personas in 8 easy steps.
Data-driven Personas are a powerful tool to better understand your customers, leverage your engagement, customer satisfaction and marketing ROI. However, unfortunately Personas are often still solely based on intuition - they remain guesswork without an actual understanding of the customer.
This article will tell you exactly why Personas are a powerful tool, how you can create them in 8 easy steps and where you can use them.
1. Why are Personas such a powerful tool?
How Personas can help your organization to better understand your customers, leverage your engagement, customer satisfaction and marketing ROI.
FIRST OFF: WHAT ARE PERSONAS?
Personas are fictional representations and generalizations of target groups / customer clusters which have similar attitudes, goals and behaviors towards your brand and/or product.
Personas should be based upon user research but make this data less complex and more easily understandable as they are a fictional yet realistic description of an archetypical target user - a human-like snapshot of relevant and meaningful commonalities. They should be described as if they were real people - including demographics, hobbies, attitudes, goals, behaviors etc.
“Personas make the design task at hand less complex, they guide your ideation processes, and they can help you to achieve the goal of creating a good user experience for your target user group” (from Interaction Design).
How did it all start?
Personas were first introduced by Alan cooper in 1998. He was working on the design of new software and interviewed some possible future users of the software to collect data and ideas to implement in his project. Without realizing it, Cooper started to play-act as a project manager and engage himself in a dialogue, inspired by one of his interviewees.He quickly found this play-acting technique to be extremely effective for solving design questions, allowing him to truly understand the user-centered point of view.
With POWDIENCE you can create data-driven personas. Signup for free to get started.
WHAT’S THE PURPOSE OF PERSONAS?
The purpose of personas is to create a reliable, realistic representation of your target groups / customer clusters - and with that to help you make better decisions by adding a layer of real-world consideration.
Or as KeepItUsable puts it: “The most important goal of personas is to create understanding and empathy with the end user(s)”.
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF PERSONAS?
There are a lot of benefits of personas, here just a few:
Providing a ‘face’ to the user story and having a greater empathy with the customer
Getting a deep understanding of who your customers / users really are
Spreading this knowledge throughout the whole team and/or company and by that
Helping team members share a consistent understanding of the customers / users
Having more effective, focussed conversations and business meetings and
Making clearer and better decisions that are focused on real customers / users, their needs and goals
Designing better products and services
Delivering better marketing campaigns
And with the help of all of that, leveraging your engagement, customer satisfaction & marketing ROI
2. How to create Personas in 8 steps?
From discovering, through shaping and to playing - here’s a detailed step-to-step guide on how you create your Personas.
1. INITIALIZATION
To initialize the persona creation process there are some parameters that should be defined in order to have a smoother process to follow.
STRATEGIC SCOPE
In a first step, define the scope of the persona creation process. Following questions need to be answered:
Value Proposition: What is the value proposition / positioning of our organization?
Differentiation: How do we differentiate ourselves from the competitors?
Business Area: For what business area of our organization do we want to create personas?
Market: What’s the market of this business area?
Customer Categories: As an assumption, what are your existing customer categories?
DATA SOURCES
In a second step, it’s crucial to get an awareness of the data inventory within the company. Ask yourself and your co-workers: What data do we already have about our customers?
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2. CUSTOMER & DATA DISCOVERY
On a qualitative and quantitative level start to truly discover your customers and develop a deep understanding.
Always have your goal here in mind: To get an overview of the data you gathered in the previous step, develop an understanding of the key facts and turn these into a list of factoids* you will use for the next step.
*Google defines factoids as “an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact.”
It’s important to understand that this is an iterative process – while you may want to begin on a more qualitative level by asking your stakeholders the first few important questions, make sure to re-iterate between qualitative and quantitative discovery a few times.
This will truly allow you to understand the full scope of data and information.
CUSTOMER DISCOVERY
To start, we recommend running a workshop with the employees that are closest to your customers and have the deepest understanding of their behaviours, needs and differences already.
To reiterate, we also recommend running customer surveys – digital or face-to-face – that answer some of the open points that might have been discovered from the data discovery. Whether digital or face-to-face, the most important thing here is to get in touch with actual or potential customers that meet your defined customer categories!
DATA DISCOVERY
In this sub-step we recommend uploading all quantitative data available to your Powdience dashboard already - this will allow you to explore the facts in a more interactive way:
Filter your data with attributes that might have been highlighted during the qualitative discovery - and uncover new correlations within your data! As an example, by filtering your results with the gender attribute, you might discover that men generally like to search for BMWs on your website while women rather search for Audis.
To better understand, validate or enrich the newly found facts and correlations, we recommend to again iterate with a qualitative discovery again.
Once you re-iterated the these sub-steps a few times, you now have the full overview of all facts and can turn them into factoids (= relevant key pieces of information that you’ve seen repeatedly in your data, that has been validated and/or can be accepted as facts).
Try to prepare a document covering all factoids - this will help tremendously in the next step to be more effective and efficient.
Determining what pieces of information are important may seem daunting at first. Don’t fret too much over this until you have tried it. When in doubt, be inclusive. It is better to start with too many factoids than too few. You might be tempted to develop criteria ahead of time (e.g., criteria for factoids that are irrelevant, too detailed, too broad, or otherwise not very helpful). We recommend that you do not.
With POWDIENCE you can create data-driven personas. Signup for free to get started.
3. PROCESS & CLUSTER
Now that you have an overview of all your data and the relevant factoids, it is time to gather these around the predefined and assumed customer categories (remember, step 1?).
The goal of this step is a set of validated customer categories and sub-categories. The number of identified (sub-) & categories within this set defines the number of personas you will create within Powdience.
Fundamentally, in this step we recommend running a workshop where, together with the key stakeholders, you will use relevant factoids to validate and enrich these categories or provide solid information to show that the assumed categories are inappropriate – in the end of this exercise, you will start to grasp the attributes that differentiate the customer categories from one another.
Generally, the agenda for this workshop should be as follows:
Describe the rules, goal, and outcome of the meeting.
Give an overview of the actions taken in the previous step (data and customer discovery) and of the identified factoids.
Discuss the identified factoids: Validate or decide to skip them (if inappropriate or irrelevant) and transfer the validated ones to individual sticky notes.
Post your predefined and assumed customer category labels (from step 1) in various locations in the room.
Cluster the factoid sticky notes and label the found groups.
As a next step, you will find different groups of factoids all around your room - while some might be close to the assumed customer categories, some groups might form fully new categories and for some customer categories, you might not even find any factoids that support them. To come to a final set of validated (sub-)categories, there are three possibilities:
Validate the assumed customer categories that seem appropriate, relevant and supported by enough factoids.
If there are too many (contradicting) factoids within one category, you might need to define sub-categories or fully new categories of customers - but only if the differentiation is relevant.
If there are no factoids around a category that can support your assumption, you might need to eliminate these inappropriate categories.
4. PERSONA ATTRIBUTES
Now that you identified a set of validated categories and sub-categories, it’s time to understand what differentiates one category from another.
The goal of this step is to define these distinctive features - the set of these features combined equals your relevant persona attributes for Powdience.
5. PERSONA DRAFTS
In this step, you upload your validated and relevant final data sets to Powdience to start the ‘Shape’ phase.
While uploading, we’ll ask you what your relevant attributes are additionally to our Powidence standard attributes. With the help of your list from the previous step, you’ll be able to do this easily.
Now start to bring your validated (sub-)categories to life! We recommend creating one persona per (sub-)category. These might be quite a lot - but don’t hesitate; in the next step you will still be able to validate and prioritize these based on their potential reach.
For each persona, fill in all the relevant data.
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6. VALIDATION & PRIORITIZATION
Once you created all of your personas on Powdience, you now see what their respective potential reach is.
We recommend first to validate all the personas created based on their reach. If your persona does not have a considerable reach, they might not be relevant for you within your market.
Then you can prioritize the validated personas again based on reach - for which segment do you see most potential for internal communication, targeting and sales?
You might ask yourself what the suggested number of prioritized personas is. Of course there is no general rule as it heavily depends on your business area, market and customers. A thumb rule however is to have 3 to 6 personas - with this number, you will be able to cover the most important parts of your market while still being reasonable for internal usage.
7. FINALIZATION
You now have a clear understanding of your most relevant validated personas.
When you created your persona drafts, you were purposely selective in what information you included - you only included the relevant attributes that helped you differentiate them, validate and prioritize them based on their reach.
STORYLINE & PICTURES
Now you want to be more exhaustive. This means that you need to include all headings and information appropriate and useful to understanding your audience, creating your communication and developing your product.
To easily and truly understand the created personas, it will help the product designers and communication team a lot to have storyline elements and pictures enriching the personas.
With Powidence, you are able to add these storyline elements and pictures directly in your persona drafts.
Here’s a tip: Don’t overdo it. Be sure to keep your stories to an appropriate length. You are not writing a novel. You will want to create interest and provide some background and context for your teammates, but keep your stories in check and don’t include detail that is superfluous and highly irrelevant. When adding details, their purpose is to help make the personas into people—to make them believable and memorable. Think of this “irrelevant” content as you would salt and pepper or other spices used in cooking. You are adding flavor to your meal, but too much would ruin the taste.
NAME & TAG LINE
Finally, create a name and tag line. Generally, we recommend creating a name and tag line together, usually something alliterative. For example, you might have “Toby the Typical Teenager,” “Abe the Active Administrator,”or “Connie the Conscientious Consumer.” You want to highlight a key differentiator/characteristic for each persona. However, be careful not to choose something potentially offensive. As a check, consider if it would bug you to have these lines added to the end of your name.
8. PLAY
Now that you’ve finalized your personas (on Powdience), you can go ahead and PLAY! For different use cases: See 4. Where can Personas be used?
3. Do's and Dont's when creating a Persona
Personas can be extremely helpful, but only when created & applied correctly. Here are the Do’s and Don’ts.
Base yourself on real data: It’s reckless and even dangerous to base a project / product / brand etc. on personas that are created out of intuition instead of real data.
Don’t stay too abstract: When personas are too abstract and theoretical, they might be misunderstood and misused. Even when there’s a lot of data backing them up, try to narrow them down to an easy-to-understand, realistic person making sure your team and you are talking about the same.
You need buy-in from leadership: Management might think they already know the user, but it’s important to underline that the largest benefit of creating and working with personas is a clear picture that everybody in the company can focus on and align around.
Don’t create personas in a silo and impose them on people: This is often one of the biggest barriers to widespread adoption and meaningful impact of personas. Personas should not be created in an isolated team and the final result then unveiled like a piece of artwork - if that’s the case, “people will use them like a piece of artwork, pinning them up on their cubicle wall to admire once in a while.” (NN Group)
Make sure people in your organization really know what personas are and why they’re useful - especially before trying to convince them to work with them.
Have a specific, well-defined goal in mind when creating personas as they’re not a one-size-fits-all tool. The data captured should reflect the goal for the personas and the scope of work they are meant to impact (E.g. Broad-scope marketing personas vs Targeted-scope UX personas).
And last but not least, avoid adding extraneous details to your personas that do not have any implications for your defined goal. A name and a photo for instance aid memorability. But on the other hand, a lot of unessential details can overwhelm and make them hard to remember. Even more dangerous, you might fall into the trap of personal implications and unconscious prejudices when trying to ‘decorate’ your personas with details that are not fully data-based.
With POWDIENCE you can create data-driven personas. Signup for free to get started.
4. Where can Personas be used?
Personas help you in various contexts - we tell you where and how.
MARKETING & ADVERTISING
Whether you’re creating a classical advertising campaign, you’re about to go live with a Social Media paid ad or you’re updating your content marketing strategy: Personas help you put the customer in focus when marketing your brand - how to reach them, talk to them, engage with them.
WEBSITE & USABILITY TESTING
When building or running a website, its user experience is key. To ensure a great user experience, of course you’ll first need to understand your users / customers. Personas help you achieving just that. With Powdience, you have the possibility to integrate real user data, turn it into lively personas, then export and share them with your whole development team.
PRODUCT & SERVICE DESIGN
The key to successful product and service design is customer focus. As designers, we need to make sure that the customer always stays in the center of thinking and designing. Personas help with exactly that: With Powdience you turn real data into lively Personas that create empathy for your customers within the design team.
DESIGN THINKING
Within the field of Design Thinking, personas play a major role. They act as a starting point when observing and interviewing your customers. They help you when working out your customer journeys. Furthermore, they build the base to ideation and prototyping, making sure your customers always stay in the center.