Persona in Design

I came across the concept of persona creation a good two years ago. It’s not a new concept and has been manipulated adeptly by the elite (i.e) the big companies like your Apples, P&Gs, Airlines, etc. More importantly, it has been mostly confined to the marketing folks who’ve put this to good use. Of late, I’ve seen that like anything under the sun, it has crept into everyday design talks and exercises.
So how could the persona impact your design? Let me take a dig at demonstrating just that.
Persona creation has traditionally leveraged from the following data resources:
- Website Analytics
- Market Research
- Social Conversation
- Conversation Data
- Demographic Data
Yeah! I know. These resources sound like something I would pitch after a quick Google search when I have 2 mins left for a product meeting.
But looking at it from a design lens helps you weed out the embellishments. What I see is:
- Who is the person ?
- Where does the person live ?
- What does the person like ?
- What does the person care about ?
Buy-in from the customer:
This is the part where you venture into the fairly unknown. This can be particularly abstruse to the person utilizing the persona to venture into a creative endeavor. You might find that it’s potent and that you’re seeing progress or in most cases, like I’ve faced see that it doesn’t really seem to connect with your audience. But the thing about any process is the incremental learning that you receive and the improvements that you impart to your persona. It grows with you.

Usually, it doesn’t hurt to have a broader spectrum to experiment with (more than 1 persona). When it is narrow and your chances of leaping to an option B is nonexistent, things tend to fall apart. So, how we market our product and the language we use help you get more in-depth and personal with your target customer. You can complement that by creating content and designing interactions that better appeals, educates and relates to your potential buyers. What has to be taken into consideration is the primacy we assign to the various characteristic traits we attribute to those personas.
Let’s see how a company has managed to typify a persona to interact with their audience base.
Dollar Shave Club:
Firstly, it comes as no surprise that Roger Federer didn’t feature in this advert. What we’re seeing here is an upstart looking to redefine the traditional mode of interaction with a large demographic comprising of the typical working professional. Had they opted to talk about their new advanced technology, they’d be up against a competition that prides itself in employing cutting edge technology crafted by people with advanced degrees and PhDs. But that’s not what they’re going for. They see the conundrum a person faces in the final stage of the sale (i.e.) THE BIG PURCHASE and they’re looking to provide a simple solution that can support the vast majority.


Finally, they back it up with conducive design. The messaging and wording on their Website, their primary point of sale is more or less consistent with what they promised in their ad campaign and the design is further strengthened by tactical positioning of CTAs (call to action buttons) across the website to help make the sale. Better design helps this start up be masters of the medium and catalyze more searches than their competition Gillette (A subsidiary of the behemoth P&G).

In essence, these companies understand that the impediments caused by technology, supply chain, and operational backlogs have been undone to a large extent thanks to globalization. This would mean a lot to these companies that can now undertake creative endeavors sooner so as to exploit the available space before the incumbents can regroup.
Empowered by Persona:
At the same time, you don’t want to be too descriptive about your persona. Keep it predictive (read more about predictive personas). Combining the targeting nature of your persona with swift prototyping capabilities of design enables you to fully exploit this space. You can try A/B testing on the various interactions and stick with what works and discard diligently what doesn’t. In the end, there is no set manual as to position your product or service. (If you aim for the barn, you might hit the door. Forget about striking the bottle you mounted on the porch.)
