Personas are user models that characterize the characteristics of people in a target group and can be seen as a proxy and blueprint of a typical customer. They are described in customer language, are as detailed as possible without losing the context of the task and as specific as possible without depicting real customers (anonymized). If you want to read more, click here: https://thenextweb.com/dd/
Personas are assigned a name and demographic characteristics and have a profession, hobbies, family and circle of friends. They sometimes get Free Spins Bitcoin Casino. They get a face through photos. They are extremely real and therefore “touchable” for all people inside and outside the organization. Once you have worked with personas you will find that the customer and the relationship to him is no longer abstract but empathic for the organisation.
Personas – child of software development
With his book “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum” from 1998, Alan Cooper is generally regarded as the origin of design personas in the form in which they are used today. He himself says that he developed his first persona called “Kathy” as early as 1983. During software development, Cooper repeatedly held fictitious dialogues with “Kathy”. This enabled him to prioritize the functions of his software and identify which functions would be used most often.
Today, personas are not only used in software development, but also in other areas of the company such as customer experience management.
Personas give target groups a face
In short, a persona is what used to be called a “user”, a “user”. A user persona is a fictitious archetype of a typical user of the website or app that is to be created.
The purpose of creating a persona is to describe the potential user as accurately as possible. In this way, you get a persona user who represents a clearly defined user group, whom you can quasi understand as a conversation partner and who can help you as follows
The psychological advantage of a very concrete definition is that it is easy for the developer to identify with the persona in question. This enables him to sense their wishes, needs and requirements and to implement them in a solution-oriented way. He can look at the project through the eyes of the persona.
A concrete definition allows to focus exactly. In this way, once requirement profiles have been found, they can be processed more consistently. If there are several personas, they have to be prioritized and operated individually. It would not be good to mix all requirement profiles and thus lose differentiation. It is impossible to design for everyone, just as it is impossible to be “everybody’s darling”. In such cases Cooper speaks of the “elastic user”, which of course does not exist.
The persona definition reliably presents the user as the goal of development even to project participants who were not involved in the goal definition.
Directional decisions in design progress become easier if they are based on a clear user definition.
Last but not least, a good user persona also allows a team member to get involved and handle the app or design under development in the way that such a person would probably have done. In this way, user tests can be carried out without real users without much effort.
Target groups are usually defined according to (socio)demographic characteristics due to a lack of available data. Their designation (for example, sinus milieus) is mostly analytically oriented and thus rather remote from practice. However, it is difficult to derive needs and behaviour from demographic characteristics alone.
For example, Ozzy Osbourne and Prince Charles have the same socio-demographic characteristics
and yet the assumption is more than justified that the two are unlikely to have much in common in terms of interests and preferences (apart from their preferences for holidays in the mountains and dogs).
Personas go beyond these demographic characteristics. The development of wishes and attitudes makes the customer tangible, the target group is humanised and thus a persona becomes a fictitious representative of this target group.
Design Personas have five essential components, which can be detailed differently depending on purpose, company and industry:
Characteristics/Demography
Demographic information relevant to the application purpose, such as age, place of residence, family, origin, social situation, which describes the target person and helps to form groups with comparable customers/interested parties.
Information that describes the target person as a personality, such as special expertise, special skills or experience. This is particularly useful in the B2B context when it comes to understanding needs from the respective role, which may differ from private goals and motivations.
Personal goals and tasks: What does the target person do privately, i.e. when he/she is not acting as a customer / interested party / contact person? Hobbies, personal interests, possibly voluntary work are just as interesting here as personal life goals of a material or immaterial nature (for example “the house by the lake” or “contributing to the protection of one’s own environment”). Here it is easy to identify points of contact, how marketing can creatively and unerringly start in surprising moments for the target person.
Personal motivation & drivers: What is the target person doing, what motivates him/her to make decisions. Which positive or negative factors can influence this person’s own decisions that are or could be relevant for the customer relationship. What creates positive emotions that can be linked to? What creates negative emotions that should be avoided?
Requirements & needs: How do customers inform themselves and how extensive is the need for information? How does the target person usually prepare decisions, simply go to Google and go to the restaurant that pops up first in the search. Or are the five options with the best ratings compared extensively and a decision is made based on the detailed information on their own website (atmosphere, menu, available payment methods, etc.)?
What expectations and needs does the customer have in terms of products, services, channels? Derived from the above-mentioned goals, tasks, motivations and drivers, typical expectations and needs emerge, which as essential decision criteria determine how likely a positive customer relationship is to be established.
Attitude towards the company: What does the target person think of the company? Is there already a previous history? What experiences have been made so far? What emotions are associated with these experiences? Where does the target person get input for the evaluation of the company (for example colleagues, professional forums or specific magazines)?
Personas are created as a pragmatic, iterative hands-on approach: In the context of Customer Journey Mapping, it has proven to be a good idea to have personas developed in joint workshops by the employees in the company. Experience shows that the necessary knowledge and understanding is very much there – only the right people have to be asked the right questions.