How to design when the persona is “everyone”?
There is no doubt that defining personas is an essential step in the design process. Plenty has been said on how companies need to go beyond demographics when defining their target audience to draw meaningful insights and create valuable solutions.
A good persona is more of a story than a profile. A story of a real person with a broader context of their values, behavior, preferences, and motivation drivers.
However, there’s a particular downside to this method.
Creating structure with Persona Matrix
When doing extensive research, one often ends up with a large number of personas, especially when designing for “universal” service providers, such as banks, retailers, or the public sector. It’s not rare for a company to end up with eight or more persona profiles, all of which so rich in insights that it is inevitably complex to design a service that meets everyone’s needs.
On top of that, some of the personas might have contradicting preferences, making it even more challenging to decide, which personas to cater to in the first place.
To address these contradictions and complexities, we have developed a tool that helps to systematize and prioritize the insights — the Persona Matrix.
The tool provides a clear and simple way to structure personas and filter out the insights that are the most relevant for the current design challenge.
The Persona Matrix helps designers to understand two important things: which are the criteria for customer segmentation that actually matter and if the customer research has covered the whole customer spectrum or some important data is still missing.
How to work with Persona Matrix?
Step 1. Define the extremes.
This is quite a typical step in persona design. We have heard a lot about how it’s the extremes that provide the most meaningful insights. However, for the persona matrix, we don’t just define extreme customer examples but also ask ourselves “What would be the exact opposite?”. As a result, you have a set of “mirroring” extremes, which lead us to the next step…
Step 2. Identify the axes.
Name the feature that the extreme opposite personas are the extremes of. It can be income, awareness, size of the household, frequency of purchase, or anything else. Generally (in our experience at least) 2 of these criteria stand out– so they can become axes X and Y. In case there’s more than 2 — you either need to prioritize or create more than one matrix to test out which combination of coordinates will turn out to be most relevant for the project.
Step 3. Place all the interviewed customers on the matrix.
This visual representation of all the interviewees on the graph will indicate what the actual customer archetypes you are dealing with are. You will inevitably see “blobs” or groups of specific individuals that will form the real working personas. If the density is low, you can also just stick to addressing the four sectors of the matrix as persona archetypes.
Such mapping will help you easily identify if you have covered the whole spectrum of customers with your research or there are still some “white spots” on the map. These will indicate the type of people yet to be interviewed to gather a full set of insights.
As this is something we have developed quite recently and have been testing out “live” on projects for about six months — we encourage you to try the Persona Matrix out on your own and reach out to me on LinkedIn to learn more about it or to share feedback and ideas on further development.
