About personas and how to create them

Summary

This video explains personas—fictional profiles based on research that represent a group of users or stakeholders. It highlights the value personas offer, such as improving team alignment, fostering empathy, and challenging traditional market segments. The video advises against relying solely on demographics, as they can lead to stereotypes. It outlines five steps to create personas: identifying key questions about customers, gathering insights through conversations and data, drafting personas, and refining them through workshops. Personas help organizations understand customer needs and improve user-centered decision-making.

Takeaways

• 🎭 A persona is a profile representing a group of people such as customers, users, employees, or stakeholders.
• 🔍 Personas are archetypes based on research, not stereotypes.
• 🛠 Personas help make groups with similar service needs more understandable and break down market segmentation stereotypes.
• 📊 Avoid using demographics like age and income for personas, as they often lead to stereotypes. Focus on user needs, patterns, and interests instead.
• 🤝 Personas can help share research findings within teams and create alignment across organizations.
• 💡 They are useful for gaining buy-in from teams or stakeholders on addressing specific user problems or needs.
• 👟 Personas encourage empathy, helping teams step into the shoes of different customer groups to understand their needs.
• 📋 To create a persona, start by identifying what you want to learn about your customers (goals, worries, needs, etc.).
• 📞 Gather information from CRM data, analytics, customer databases, or direct customer interactions to build your persona.
• 🖊 Create drafts of personas through workshops, involving customers or frontline staff, and refine them for professional use.

Q & A

What is a persona?

A persona is a profile representing a particular group of people, such as customers, users, market segments, employees, or any other stakeholder group. It is based on research and is used to better understand similar service needs within a group.

How do personas differ from stereotypes?

Personas are based on research and serve as archetypes, while stereotypes are oversimplified and often inaccurate representations of groups. Personas focus on understanding needs, while stereotypes can lead to generalizations that are not actionable.

What role do personas play in challenging traditional market segments?

Personas can be used to challenge existing definitions of market segments by focusing on user needs and patterns, rather than relying on traditional demographic data like age or gender, which may not provide meaningful insights into user behavior.

Why are demographics often less useful for personas?

Demographics like age, gender, and income are easy to collect but often lead to stereotypes. These factors may not predict user needs accurately. For instance, Netflix finds demographics unhelpful for predicting user preferences.

How can personas benefit an organization?

Personas provide value by sharing research findings, creating a common language across teams, helping gain buy-in on specific user needs, and fostering empathy for different customer groups.

What is an example of how a company might use personas in practice?

Some companies use life-size cardboard cutouts of their personas and bring them to meetings to ensure that a specific customer perspective is considered in decision-making.

What are the five steps to creating a persona?

The five steps are: 1) Determine what you want to learn about the customer. 2) Talk to your customers. 3) Use existing data (CRM, analytics, etc.). 4) Create a draft persona in a workshop setting. 5) Refine the persona using professional illustrations and further development.

Why is talking to customers important in persona creation?

Talking to customers provides direct insights into their goals, concerns, needs, and expectations, making the personas more accurate and useful.

What kind of existing information can be used to create personas?

CRM data, analytics, customer databases, and order history are all valuable sources of information that can help inform the development of personas.

How can involving customers or frontline staff improve the persona creation process?

Involving customers or frontline staff who interact with customers regularly provides more accurate and relevant insights, as they have direct experience with the needs and behaviors of the people being represented.