Improving product development through personas.

Making commitments is hard. Dealing with the effects of bad commitments is even harder.

Whether you are just starting out or midway through a project making the right commitment is critical to your success. It usually follows that the smaller the commitment the better as you are more responsive and more agile but not always. Sometimes we are faced with a leap of faith; a time where we almost blindly follow our intuition, come to a decision and make a commitment. These can be testing times for an individual, team or organisation as you enter the unknown only knowing that you are fixed on this path. And while I say ‘the unknown’ it’s not like you have just cobbled together a solution hoping there is a market; well at least I hope not. Behind every product there will be a customer and ideally that customer will have a certain sets of needs and desires which are yet to fulfilled. It is at this customer where your persona will begin and development should start.

A persona identifies your user’s goals, needs and passions. It also helps to articulate the type of audience you are aiming to resonate so sweetly with. There are two main types to consider when creating one for your next venture, endeavour or whatever buzzword you’ve creatively attached:

1. Design persona — pinpoints the user goals, behaviours and pain points

2. Marketing persona — describes demographics, buying motivations/concerns and influences

A design persona will tell a story that stakeholders understand, relate and remember during your development process. It is good for insights and understanding as it focuses on user types and helps definition through its narrow nature. While a marketing persona will explain behaviour and is often expressed as range 30–45 years old as an example. This means a marketing persona is good for determining rationale but bad for defining your product. By that I mean what it is, how it should work, what to prioritise and how it will be used.

You can start to see the structure and value a persona offers; it is making you think more about your target market and how your product fits. Remember we don’t want to be building a product that no ones wants. Unfortunately however common obstacles often get in the way of creating personas. One of the main being the misconceptions behind how to create a persona, with many thinking they require a lot of research prior to construction. Put simply, you don’t need reams of primary research as you can start with the wealth of secondary that already exists. I strongly doubt you are creating something that all research is irrelevant to.

To help you create your first persona you should think carefully about the problem you are trying to solve. You then identify all the individuals or organisations that are faced with this problem before grouping them into segments. You then rank the relative pain this problem causes for each segment along with their elasticity to respond to pricing. You want to identify the segment which has the highest correlation between pain and pricing as this will be the segment which you can monetise easiest and learn from quickest. This segment should be your first persona.

Another obstacle comes from poor construction leading to a loss of credibility. If you don’t spend time when creating your persona your going to have cracks and unfortunately most of the time that means you’ll fall through them! Firstly you need to clarify all aspects of the persona before clearly communicating these with all stakeholders. Make sure to get full stakeholder approval and address any of their concerns head on as this will improve your personas integrity. A third obstacle happens after its creation, a misunderstanding about how to use the persona. I mean you’ve created it but where does it help or fit in with development? The short answer is here at ucreate we think alongside scenarios is a great place to start as it means your product is always focused around your user. You explain to development how a user will think and use your product and that helps enormously when fine tuning. If you would like to learn more about scenarios read another of our articles here.

So those are some of the obstacles faced but what does a good persona look like? Here are some tips we would recommend:

1. It should be realistic not idealised (Don’t build a product no one wants)
2. Focus on the present not the future (Don’t hypothesis what user needs ‘might’ be)
3. Compare against external research findings (Save time, improve accuracy)
4. You need to provide a challenging but not unrealistic design target (Push boundaries)
5. It should yield insights into user needs (Context, attitudes, behaviours & struggles)

See below for a template you could look to apply:

So far so good right but surely there must be some criticisms otherwise everyone would use them. Some of the common criticisms against a persona include:

• How can the business goal be aimed at one user?
• What happens when our persona identifies needs outside our scope?
• How would you go on to to delight more than one user?

Put simply widening your target doesn’t improve your aim. You will be pleased to hear that a primary persona design will delight a secondary persona(s). The problem with designing for everyone is that you delight no one and following this route is a recipe for an average product. You should not settle for this, you should be aspiring for so much more! To address the second comment here at ucreate we would also strongly recommend against having a scope. Your development should focus on the build, measure, learn feedback loop with your backlog under constant review. By taking this flexible approach you continually learn about your users and you can accommodate those value adding features at the expense of something that is merely nice to have. If you provide value it will usually end up delighting more than just the one user so you have an answer to the third criticism.

So now you understand the criticisms aren’t really criticisms but you are still not 100% sure on the practicality of a persona? Let me clear that up. Firstly they provide user-centric design which is something that will create happy faces, doesn’t disrupt habits too abruptly and ultimately gains user buy in. You also avoid the plague of persistent and needless design changes as you stop all stakeholder requests from becoming one of them. You cannot these changes to happen as you need to challenge from the perspective of your persona. If you are collecting a bank of changes then you should think carefully about your approach to prioritising. Without a persona you can’t determine what goals you want to achieve and without this your approach to adding priority is near sporadic. While finally you don’t want to allow self referential design (your designers own mental model) and you certainly don’t want elastic users (a design to accommodate all). Your persona keeps you focused, you build a product that fulfils a need and you avoid blurring your identity.

To summarise your persona is the user voice. It guides scenarios meaning you provide consistent work items to your development team. You remain focused on needs and goals not features and capabilities. You design for the primary and accommodate the secondary. Take a step back and think if you were in their shoes what would you do?