Before developing personas for your company or product, ask yourself these questions first (Part 1)
Persona success depends on knowing the tradeoffs and choosing the right tool for the research. There are many types of personas serving different purposes. When designing or developing a product, we always want to be clear about who our users are or who our customers are. Before starting the persona research plan, you may want to ask yourself these questions:
1. Who will be your audience (stakeholders) of personas?
2. What will your audience (stakeholders) uses personas for?
3. Do you also need buyer personas?
4. What is the scope of your personas’ influences?
5. What types of persona do you need?
6. What perspectives of personas would suit your purpose more?
Although we should have aligned information about who our target audience / customers are, the content of personas could vary and this would also impact what kind of research methods we are going to apply. Answering these questions will help you decide what kind of content in the personas will be helpful for the different audience.
In this article and the next, I want to share some information that I found useful for answering these questions. And this will help you decide what types of personas you should create for your audience.
1. Who will be your audience (stakeholders) of personas?
Before starting the research plan, make sure you are clear about who will be using your personas - who are you creating the personas for? Are they for your own design team, product owners, marketing team, sales team, customer success team, or even executive team?
2. What will your audience (stakeholders) uses personas for?
Once you know who your audience of personas are, you then may want to figure out what your audience is using the personas for.
For example, if the personas are for both designers and product owners, the purpose of using personas could help them make design decisions or explain the “why” behind the decisions.
If the personas are for only product owners, they could help product owners focus on the needs of the most important user groups, prioritize features that solve actual user problems, or implement new functionality in line with how customers will actually use it.
If the personas are for marketers, they could help push for marketing initiatives, and drive real results for the business, brand, and marketing efforts.
If the personas are for executive alignment, the personas would help them figure more prominently in strategic decisions, debate and agree upon value propositions that serve the needs and goals of the personas.
With a consistent voice of the personas, high level decision makers could help executive discussions and make decisions for corporate strategy, and product direction. In the other hand, without a consistent voice, decisions are debated and made based on each executive’s responsibilities and professional perspectives.
3. Do you also need buyer personas?
Sometimes answering the “Who are my customers?” question accurately might be a bit more complicated. When marketing your products to companies, rather than individuals, “my customers” could have two folds — end users and buyers. When thinking about personas, it will be helpful if there are two sets of personas — one set of personas is for the users who use your product everyday while another for the people who administer your product.
Buyers personas are very useful especially for marketing and sales teams. With buyer personas, marketers or sales would be able to attract the most valuable visitors, leads, and customers to the business.
When conducting user persona research, or when you are talking to your end-user, you want to focus on how to help them get job done with ease of use and make their lives better.
However, for buyer persona, you might want to also include the customer company’s procurement staff to provide insights for product strategy or focus on more flexible pricing options and streamlining the procurement process.
There are many types of buyers across your customer’s organization. You may want to consider all different levels of potential buyers, such us:
A. The End User’s Supervisor or Department Head
For the person managing your product’s end users, you want to learn what they care the most — for example, what they care the most could be if your product improve their team’s overall productivity or save the company money?
B. The Company’s Management Team or Executive Leadership
For the executives as your buyer persona, you may want to focus on how your product can help achieve their high-level goals.
C. The IT Team who Will be Overseeing Your Product’s Use
The IT team at your customer’s organization might be considered as your buyer persona. Normally they care about if your product is simple to deploy — little oversight and only minimal IT resources for staff training and troubleshooting. In addition, they also care if your product is secure and won’t jeopardize the company’s data security or regulatory compliance.
D. The Procurement Team who Will be Purchasing Your Product
For the customer company’s procurement staff, you might want to include in your product strategy a focus on more flexible pricing options and streamlining the procurement process.
Overall, user personas focus on details such as ease of use while buyer personas are more interested in higher-level goals. A buyer persona may be a team of decision-makers with different goals and expectations. Sometimes the buyer and user may be the same person — but they will have different priorities based on their user persona and their buyer persona. Figure these aspects out will help you plan your research.
4. What is the scope of your personas’ influences?
Another important aspect to consider is the scope of your personas. The scope of personas depends on what your stakeholders are going to use them for and what kind of goals they want to achieve.
You can start with asking what your stakeholders’ goal is. Do they want to create personas to influence one project or many projects? Do they want to get insights for making high-level strategic decision? Or do they need insights for driving design direction? The scope will be based on what you (and your stakeholders) want to achieve.
No persona could be one-size-fits all.
There are two types of scope:
1. Broad scope:
When the goal for personas is to help make high-level strategic decision, you need broad scope of persona. These broad scope of personas will influence many areas of business and many products within the business.
2. Narrow scope:
If the goal of personas is to drive design direction, then you will create a specific set of personas to guide design direction and they will have narrow but detailed focus because they will only influence only one product line of the business.
Take RingCentral as an example, the broad and narrow scope personas would look like this:
The goal for broad scope personas is to find similar segments of users across all the product lines, as a result, more generic and fewer attributes could be used to describe these users. They include high-level data and are only useful for high-level understanding and decision making.
On the other hand, the narrow scope personas could include detailed and richer data. Because there is less context to consider, all the attributes are directly nailed down to a specific product line. User’s behaviors and needs are all around the specific product line. This will allow you to find more information about users behaviors, likes, dislikes, motivations, goals, etc. And this kind of narrow scope personas could provide the team with information to guide design directions and make design decisions.
Therefore, to figure out what the goal from your stakeholders is very important for you to scope the research plan.
In part 2, we will discuss the rest two questions — “What types of persona do you need?” and “What perspectives of personas would suit your purpose more?”. Stay tuned!
