Demystifying User Persona

Understanding User Persona for beginners

Photo by Margarida CSilva on Unsplash

A product is built for people (end-users) and by people (product team). At both ends of the spectrum are people (users). Hence it’s important to understand them to make a good product. In this blog, we will focus on end-users.

As per Philip Kotler, father of marketing, consumer adoption is a 5 step process :

1. Awareness stage
2. Interest and Information stage
3. Evaluation stage
4. Trial stage
5. Adoption stage

One of the key factors which influence the Evaluation & Trial stage and hence the successful adoption is the product design i.e. how well have you understood the problem statement and solved it.

The assumption behind the product/feature specification is to treat all the users as a monolith. All users are considered the same and hence have the same needs and goals.

However, that’s not always true. If you dig deeper, you will understand that your product will be used differently by different sets of users. If you don’t consider this aspect, you won’t build the right solution and this will impact the product adoption.

Introduction to User persona

Before you start identifying a user persona, you need to understand what it stands for.

User persona is a representation of a segment of your end users. To build a user persona, you need to identify their goals, needs, pain points, behavior, demographics.

Personas are created based on research insights and your experience of working with your customers.

User personas help humanize a user by putting a face. It enables you to connect with the users at a personal and emotional level.

You need to capture the following attributes to identify user persona:

1. Reasons to use your product — What is the outcome a user expects from the product.
2. Knowledge and skills — What do users know, what are they good at
3. Extra Info such as demographics, environment
4. Pain points
5. Behavior traits

How to conduct the User persona exercise

1. Bring your notes or research insights about your users
2. Identify the user segments
3. Pick a segment and create a rough list of personas in them
4. Make a list of users’ personality traits that make them different from one another in a given segment. For example: Not all cab riders are the same. They will have different levels of technology experience.
5. Identify the top 3–5 attributes that impact your product design. This can also be done as a group exercise
6. fill the persona template for typical users within the segment
7. Group similar personas
8. Repeat this exercise for the next segment

Illustration

Let’s take an example :

There is a B2B product where customers place an order, and you need to fulfill those orders. This is an existing product to which we need to add a reporting, analytics feature.

To begin with you need to identify the various user segments, even before you get into the details of identifying the various reports, data points, and the technology / libraries required to build this feature. Let’s list the various user segments and their needs.

1. Customer — As a customer, I need to
2. Get a view of all the orders that they have placed over a period of time
3. View the status of each of the orders
4. Support team — As a support team member, I need to
5. View the orders placed by each of the customers
6. View the order owner, responsible to fulfill the order
7. View the current Order status
8. Business team — As a business owner, I need to
9. View the overall order count in a given time period
10. View the Order count per customer in a given time period
11. View the Rate of order processing / fulfillment
12. View the revenue generated from each customer in a given time period

In the example above we identified the various user segments and their needs. Once you have identified the user segments, you need to check if there are any personas in each of the segments. In our example, we didn’t need to make that classification as it was a simplistic scenario.

Key Takeaways

1. Personas aggregate insights about real customers into a typical representation of a customer
2. They highlight the gap or assumptions in our understanding of customers
3. Personas guide product design decisions
4. Personas help you build empathy for the end users across the company
5. They help you better understand your customers
6. They keep your solution grounded in real customers’ needs and problems

In the next post I will present a case study using a popular product in the B2B, B2C space.