Who is your audience? Sometimes you have to guess.
“This is far too specific! How did we know that we had users like this? What if our users were actually 45 years old, or not college-educated? We can’t risk thinking like this – what if we think these are our users and then they aren’t?”
The origin of this outburst was sharing one of my team’s sample personas with a marketing manager.
Persona Analysis is the process of identifying individual person representatives for your target audience and fleshing out their traits, likes and dislikes, frustrations and limitations. For most designers, this is an invaluable tool for remembering “you are not your user”.
For product managers, personas provide a framework for writing use cases, justifications for feature requirements, and an easy way to educate other teams (engineering, QA, customer care) on the “why” of what they’re building and supporting. It’s so easy to think, “this is important to me, so it must be important to my customers,” but having those clear personas is a great gut-check. If someone on your team who loves tweaking website preferences is pushing really hard to support CSS skins, it’s not hard to look at “Donna” and realize that she will never, ever take the time to switch skins or customize a page layout – she doesn’t have the time and that’s not her priority.
In an ideal world, the personas for your products are based on measurable evidence. You look at usage patterns, look at the market for your industry, and you do some primary research with customers, and based on that, you can draw up a very accurate picture.
In a non-ideal world, you take whatever you have. In our case, our personas originated from three sources of feedback: our beta user community, the in-house usability tests we conducted, and voice of the customer feedback from one of our biggest clients. These sources painted three distinct pictures – a “hard core” early tech adopter type, a “time poor” household manager type, and a “high net worth” investor type.
Are these personas the most accurate pictures of our users? Probably not. But – here’s the important part – they are not us. Having the intellectual discipline to think not just as “yourself” or “teamself” is a difficult thing, maybe a scary thing. But what choice do you have?
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