Four ways to use Personas in Innovation
How to use Personas for Marketing, Sales, Validation and Storytelling
Human Centred innovation
When coming up with ideas for a new product, service, story, or other artefact, that ultimately will be judged by people in the form of users, customers, or audience, it makes good sense to design in a ‘human centred’ way: always keeping the needs, thoughts, and character of the people you are making it for in mind.
But, as there can be a lot of noisy, conflicting ’soft’ data to work with, as well as numerical research information, it can be hard for any designer to get a clear picture of what those needs, thoughts, etc are exactly. And if it is hard for any single designer, it is even harder for a team. It is just hard to combine ‘hard’ numerical data on for instance the demographics of a customer segment with more emotional, ’soft’ information.
Personas are not real people, but they represent them throughout the design process. They are hypothetical archetypes of actual users. […] Personas are defined by their goals
— Alan Cooper (The Inmates are Running the Asylum)
That is where personas come in. They transform an amorphous collection of stories, anecdotes, and facts into fictional characters that we can relate to. Putting a name and a face to them helps to bring the relevant information into focus. In this way, personas answers the question ‘Who do we design for?’.
Types of Personas
Personas can be used for many different things, and as such, many different types or flavours of personas have evolved.
Design Personas
Design Personas are used to support product design and service design. They represent users of that product or service, and are grouped together by e.g. the problems they experience, the needs they have, their preferences, and their goals. They describe the needs of potential users and help developers focus on finding out what solutions benefit users the most. Used mainly in Service design, UX design, interface design
Marketing Personas
Marketing Personas are used to figure out what types of marketing strategies, channels, and styles should be used to reach potential customers. Different groups of customers might share certain buying preferences, social relations, modes of consumption, and buying power. Used mainly in: Marketing, Branding, Sales.
Validation Personas
Validation personas are used to support the early stages of the design process for a new product or service. They help get insight into who you are designing the product or service for, their needs, and their behaviours. They help map out assumptions you may have about what the product should be, and confront these assumptions with reality. Where traditionally design personas are used in a more detailed way, figuring out design problems in user experience or interface design, personas used for validation are more high level, and deal with how people experience a problem. Used mainly in: Early stage product or service design, Startups
Storytelling Personas
Storytelling personas are used to map out how an audience will respond to a story, presentation, or pitch. What do they know, think, and feel before they have experienced the story? What would you like them to know, think, and feel afterward? Using storytelling personas can help you to figure out how to reach different groups in your target audience that have different preferences and needs. Used mainly in: Presentation design, Ted Talks, Pitches
Curious about how to use these types of personas effectively? Download the tool guide!
The Persona Canvas
When creating personas, it helps to use some kind of format to help integrate the information in a concise overview. The Persona Canvas does just that.
The toolbox already has a simple step by step guide for this canvas, but we found that in practice many people struggle to create good personas, especially when they want to tailor them toward storytelling, marketing, or validation.
Tool Guide
To fill this gap, and to make it even easier to create great personas for the different use cases mentioned above, I have now created a special Tool Guide for the Persona Canvas.
Happy experimenting!
