Persona
July 4, 2010 | Persona, Product Development, provide the value
For effective, commercial, product development to take place it is essential to know the target users.
One of the practical best practice methods to align the team on the target user is to develop and share a persona, for each key market segment.
Meet Felix:
A persona provides fictional descriptions of typically 3-8 different user groups who either currently use your product or are expected to use your product in the future and are the subject of your product design and development focus.
The personas are fictional but they are realistic. The best personas are based upon market research, but sometimes useful personas can be created by sitting in a room with a few colleagues and identifying key themes. Just be careful that you are not the persona and you are not the customer.
I reviewed a great book back in 2007 that provides detailed advice on how to develop and use Personas. The book is The user is always right : a practical guide to creating and using personas for the Web Mulder S., Yaar.,
New Riders Publishing, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2006. 312 pp.
Depends if you have access – but my full review is available on reviews.com
A simple persona will include the following sections and be presented on a single sheet of paper.
- Persona Name – can be anything but be sure to use a selection of male and females, and choose names that represent the cultures of your target audience
- Persona Theme – in 5-20 words, capture the essence of this persons goal, their user story, this will capture why they are interested in the same product area as the one you are providing
- Personal Profile – provide a couple of paragraphs that make the Persona “come alive” for the development team. What are their dreams, how do they approach solutions now for this domain area, what is painful for them and what delights them. Remember successful products do not just deliver the Hygiene factors but they also delight and motivate those customers
- Your objectives – this depends on whether you are a commercial enterprise or not. But either way – you – as persona creator – should list 2-5 things that you want this persona to do with your product. If you cannot think of anything sensible then clearly you have a problem as you may not have a viable product for this persona!
- Personal information – a persons represents a summary of multiple people within a category – but development teams do not respond well to bar graphs of age and gender profiles, so give this Persona an age, gender, tell us a little about whether they are married or single , do they have hobbies and favourite TV shows. What is their personality like?
- Domain background – for the product area you are focussing on what is their experience to date, how much do they spend, how often, and what is their knowldge level for your product?
- Internet usage – although we may assume as internet product developers that everyone is on the net 24*7 – of course that is not true. It is important to capture and consider how your market will access your product and for internet based services, will they use a pc, or a mobile device and also what type of access speeds to the internet they have. While in the western world , and especially in IT related roles, an increasing number of people with both high speed internet access via PC and mobile, there are also many millions of people with only dial up access in certain parts of the world. So if you are looking for a truly global product launch, don’t forget that you may have some users in parts of the world with only a 14K dial up connection.
