How to create a learner persona to boost sales and student outcomes

Meet Nantale, a 21-year-old mother-to-be from Nairobi.

She has a high school diploma, and speaks Swahili and English. After talking to her doctor in prenatal care, she became aware of the importance of good nutrition during pregnancy, and for her future child. She’s now scouring the internet to learn more about healthy eating habits, and apps that could help her track nutrition on her trusty Samsung S5.

Nantale isn’t a real person.

But for the team developing a new nutrition app for Kenyan mothers, she might as well be their closest friend.

They have her photo and bio pinned in every room of the office. Product designers think of her as they decide on new features; authors consider her tastes and nutritional needs; and the marketing team is writing blog posts she’d love to read.

What’s a persona?

A persona is the impersonation of your entire customer database in one name, bio and picture.

It lets you imagine an actual human being using your product, and a vivid story of how it fits into their lives.

This allows everyone on your team to keep Nantale’s goals and preferences in mind as you work on your edtech startup. You couldn’t do it, if you had to refer to an endless spreadsheet at every step.

Brainstorming the right questions

Before you create a customer persona, it’s important to fully understand your existing customers. If you don’t yet have customers, then you can build your persona based on the survey data that you’re collecting during your research stage.

Here are just some of the questions you’ll have to answer:

• What problem do they have that you can solve at scale?
• What are tangentially related topics they are interested in?
• How old are they, and what’s their education level?
• What characteristics are shared in their lifestyle?
• How much money do they have, and how do they choose to spend it?

The questions you might want to ask depend on your particular product, what you are teaching, and the kinds of customers you serve.

I recommend you ask as many questions as possible and make sure everyone is involved. Give each of your team members a pen and blank flashcards, set a timer for 3 minutes, and ask them to write as many ideas as possible. The crazier, the better!

Collecting data

Once you come up with a good set of questions, it’s time to do some research! This can take quite some time, and you might have to approach each step in a different way:

Web analytics

The easiest place to start is Google Analytics, your payment service provider, and whatever other software you use to track your customers.

You’ll be surprised how many questions you can answer with this data alone, including the location of your customers, the time of day they tend to access your product, and so on. For your users located in the US, Google Analytics can even give you detailed demographic data such as age and household income!

Clearbit

If you work with institutional customers, you could use a service like Clearbit to automatically enrich your existing customer data with additional information about their demographic profile and place of employment.

Interviews & focus groups

The best step to take next is to organize a focus group with a few customers at a time, or interviews with individual learners. The purpose is to have a friendly chat about how they are using your product and why. Good topics to talk about include:

• What their life goals are, and how your product helps them achieve them
• What their typical day is, and how your product fits into that schedule
• Their frustrations, and skill level (study skills, technical abilities, etc.)

It’s best to do these in person, but if your users are around the globe, Skype is a good enough alternative. I’d encourage you to conduct these with video, so that you can observe facial expressions as you ask each question.

Open-ended customer survey

Your interviews and focus groups should give you an idea for topics to investigate in more detail, with a larger sample of students. You could send these out as open-ended questions in a one-off survey, or as separate questions over time.

For example, ask your customers what product they’d use if your were not available. A simple tool to conduct your first survey is Survey.io.

Qualitative customer surveys

If you have a large enough number of existing students (at least a few hundred), try sending out a survey to collect demographic data, detailed information on how they are using your product, and the goals they’re trying to achieve through it.

Use this opportunity to narrow down questions from your open-ended survey. For example, you can let users vote on the top 10 competitors they’ve mentioned in their long-form answers.

Keep in mind that only a small percentage of people will likely reply to your survey, and some demographics are more likely to respond than others, which could lead to self-selection bias.

Creating a customer persona

Your goal now is to come up with an archetype of a user — a short profile that makes relatable all the data you’ve collected in the previous step.

A good persona should include:

• behavioural patterns
• short and long-term goals
• needs
• attitudes, beliefs and opinions
• skills and abilities

Make the persona as vivid and believable as you can. Some companies go as far as to include a fake profile photo, a precise age, and so on… This may sound silly, but it’ll really help everyone to be on the same page.

If you’re an early-stage company, or just getting ready to launch, you should probably have just one learner persona. Otherwise you risk losing focus, and building something that’s not quite right for any one type of user.

If you have an established business with a varied user base, it’s OK to have secondary personas to account for different customers using your product. For example, to match our initial persona, Nantele, we can create David.

• David is a 24-year-old designer in Kisumu, Kenya. He and his wife are about to have their first child, and David wants to make sure his partner is eating well during her pregnancy.

Still, I’d recommend not to go overboard, and always be clear about your primary target.

This could be a persona for your most common customer type, your highest-value subscriber, or your most vocal user group. It could also be one that overlaps with several other common personas.

If your product is popular with too many different users, consider launching separate versions under different brands targeting each customer group.

Some examples

Below is a list of sample personas for a hypothetical language learning website.

Notice how we worded them as short stories, rather than a bullet point list, and gave each persona a name. This should help you imagine the person behind each profile as you author a lesson, write a blog post, or design a new product feature.

Teenage Tom

He is inspired by the culture of his target country and dreams of travelling there one day. He needs guidance and doesn’t know many alternative learning methodologies. He doesn’t have money and must convince his parents that a language course is a good investment.

Student Susan

She draws inspiration from her long-time passion for the culture, but complements it with more practical professional and academic motivations. She is an experienced student and has a support network at school or university, as well as access to alternative learning resources. She is frugal, but can get occasional support from her parents if the cause is right.

Business Bob

He is learning the language with the objective of getting a job in the target country or advancing his professional career. He has experience and access to other resources, but not the time to choose books or devise a study plan. He has a budget to dedicate to the task if he sees clear results.

Expat Eleanor

She lives in her target country and wants to improve both for professional purposes and day-to-day communication. She has been learning the language before and has a wealth of opportunities to practise in the real world. She is well off, but has many other, more pressing expenses.

Married Marc

He is married to a foreign spouse and wants to learn her native language to connect with her family and culture. He has been learning the language before and has daily opportunities to practise with his wife. The newlyweds have many pressing expenses and his spouse doesn’t fully appreciate his need to learn the language as they “can just speak English.”

Nomad Nadia

She is travelling the world with no permanent place of residence. Local languages often catch her interest, but she rarely keeps on learning once she moves on. She speaks several languages and struggles to maintain them on the go. She is frugal but ready to spend good money if she sees clear results.

Linguist Liam

Language learning is his passion, in and of itself. He is a jack of all languages, but a master of none except IPA and Toki Pona. He has tried hundreds of online resources but always comes back to his trusty pen and paper. He spends a lot of money on his hobby, but mostly in terms of polyglot conference tickets and journal subscriptions.

Refugee Rina

Outside events forced her to find refuge in a foreign country, and she is now learning the local language to start a new life. She has study experience from learning English, but does not know good resources to learn her third language. She has a limited budget, but is ready to spend money if she sees clear results, and can get support from third parties.

Use the personas

All this hard work has been a waste of time if you don’t put your new personas to use.

It’s important to get your entire team on board, and consider your target personas in every discussion about product features, user experience, curriculum design, and marketing.

You should also keep your persona in mind when deciding on a new international market to enter, and localizing your website.

Ask yourself:

• Will the new feature get the persona closer to her goal?
• What does the persona already know about the topic?
• Can she understand the language used?

Consider every decision through the eyes of your persona, and the result will be a better experience for your learners, and an improvement to your bottom line.