How to tell a (better) story about your customer
4 Steps to Making your Personas Stick
The Dilemma Zalando has grown quickly over the last ten years, and continues to do so at a rapid pace. Of course this is great for us and our customers, but such expansive growth does come with some struggles. In terms of design, we must constantly discover new ways to meet the needs of a diverse customer base of more than 22 million people… diverse in terms of age, geography, income, taste and more. We do a lot of user research, work with segmentations and toolkits in order to better understand our customers and ultimately build a better product. But still, the question often remains: who are we ultimately serving? This can lead to some interesting discussions, confused by personal biases and stereotypes, misalignment between teams and business units, disagreements in prioritization, “one size fits all” communication initiatives and unclear impact of teams on customers.
Our Approach It was clear we needed to look into some issues. Our ultimate goal was to help all the teams at Zalando better empathize with our customers. So, we set up a team of two product designers and one user researcher and embarked on a five week project to draft a holistic set of personas to represent some of the different motivations people have for wearing and buying clothes. A common method of creating personas is to start with user research. We tweaked this method a bit and instead built a set of prototype personas based on past company research. We found we already knew a lot about our customers’ needs, so we wanted to figure out which kind of personas would be the most useful for our purposes. Only then would we invest our effort into qualitative and quantitative research at a larger scale to iterate on the prototypes.
1. Involve the company to get out of your bubble
Why and what The success of our project was dependant on our colleagues actually making use of our characters and the buy-in from leadership. From the beginning stages we involved people and departments from across the company to make sure we addressed their various needs.
How First we conducted looking-in interviews with leaders in the company. Next we built a group of extended team members — #product #market research #marketing #media-sales — to join us for two co-creation workshops, asking for constant feedback throughout the process.
Learning We learned that people across the company really want to understand our customer better, but another tool created in a silo wouldn’t solve the problem. So we made sure to bring people from various departments and business units with us on the journey to help us think more holistically.
2. Start with the motivations of customers to spark empathy
Why and what The first workshop was about building on teams’ existing knowledge and gaining an understanding of what is the most relevant information people need when designing new products.
How Four teams held brainstorming sessions to discover what motivates people to dress a certain way, to purchase certain clothes. Those motivators served as anchors for drafting four representable personas. The second half of the workshop involved bringing one persona to life by describing and prioritizing certain characteristics of that person.
Learning The workshop output served as inspiration for the final set of motivations and characters. Interestingly enough, the four teams independently came up with a very similar set of characters. And we all came to the same conclusion that very specific attributes of people, like demographics or income, were not particularly helpful in creating empathy with our characters.
3. Design characters and tell their story to make them usable on a daily basis
Why and what The next efforts were all about bringing the personas to life so people could memorize them, empathise with them and use them regularly.
How We renamed “personas” as “characters” as many people in our company have existing biases when it comes to personas. We told the story of our six characters from their own perspective, in an interview-like style. For us, an actionable story meant including a characters’ entire style journey — from inspiration to wearing — and both fashion joys and fashion frustrations. Sketching out each portrait by highlighting it’s personality helped make them even more relatable. We forced ourselves to not rely on existing stereotypes and remain open minded.
Learning Getting regular feedback through google docs helped us avoid filling in the blanks with our own biases and to collect research conducted by other teams. Storytelling helped us to make our character relatable even if we didn’t use a photo of a person nor focused on a specific taste of the character.
4. Teach, test, iterate and spread to make your characters loved and used
Why and what In the final workshop we presented the iteration of the characters to the extended team and practiced putting it to use.
How We shared our learnings with the participants, taking the time to present every character in detail. We then asked everyone to split into three teams, and presented each with a challenge which they were translate into a customer journey for two of the characters. Based on those journeys we asked them to develop one concept that could help both characters’ concerns. Our beta testing teams are currently using the characters and we will stay in close contact with them to address any concerns and get feedback for our second iteration.
Learning We had a lot of fun presenting the characters…the audience asked lots of questions, criticizing certain aspects but also identifying with some characteristics. It was a lively discussion that helped everyone get familiar with the various characters. We will continue to have such conversations when we are ready to share them with the entire company, helping us to further fine-tune. One big learning is that our storytelling focus on the whole customer journey really helped people to zoom out and think more holistically about their product.
Look out
We are now in the beta phase of our character creation and we want to draw connections to existing frameworks and customer segmentations within the company to achieve a more holistic understanding of our customer. We will design a second iteration based on extensive qualitative and quantitative research in Europe and based on feedback from our beta testers.
Jochen Saal is a product designer with Zalando. Follow him on twitter.
Thanks to Fabian Hasse and Khyati Trehan for being great team members in developing the Personas discussed in this article.
