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Lesson 1: Customer Personas
Chapter 1: Customer Personas
Nathan Monk, a Senior Strategist for MaRS Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector, begins this lesson by introducing the concept of “customer personas” and how they serve your product development.
Personas create a narrative about your customers. They humanize them and bring them to life in a way that's way more meaningful than a market research statistic. Personas are powerful tools in understanding your customers. Once you've created a persona, they become reference for a collection of characteristics about your product or service. Tell a story about the customer and empathize with the problem they have. It's totally okay to guess about it but try to use what you learn from conversations with your customers…pour over that data.
Combine the persona with a set of photos from your customer development interviews and you'll have an even clearer picture of who your customers are. Especially when, why, how, where they need your product the most. Use real people whenever possible, with real emotions, desires and frustrations. Stay relevant to the product and problem you're solving.
Chapter 2: Developing Customer/User Personas
Greg Dubejsky, the Director of Corporate Engagement for MaRS Discovery District, applies his own experience developing customer/user personas for major companies such as PNG.
The user is ultimately someone you're trying to sell your product or service to. It's a component of your target market, and I think you can get really defined if you start to think about them as more than just a number. A persona helps lend almost a character to that person so you can understand who they are, what they're doing and why…what they're thinking about. Maybe understand a bit more of their demographics. It's that complete circle, that whole understanding of the persona that really helps tie things together.
If you can have a really specific character or a series of characters in your mind, then you can go out and canvas those folks, they might be your friends, or they might be your friends of friends who embody some of those characteristics. Through direct observation or conversation, you can start to validate some of those assumptions, and
little by little build up your data set. If you want to go deeper than that and go into qualitative analysis as the resources and tools become available to you, that's great. But starting by direct behavioural observation is a really powerful tool.
Where do you start to create a persona? You wanna have a real understanding of the type of behavioural characteristics that your persona embodies. Sometimes it helps to understand who this person might be if they were in a movie and understand what their life would be like. Sometimes it's modelled after somebody you know. There's a really interesting technique to think about who might be the extreme user for your product or service. Who might be the anti-hero? If you can consider that spectrum, especially including those extremes, you start to get a really interesting look at the different types of need-states that you might be able to define.
Once you start identifying the need states, you want to go out and try to validate and understand. So you've got a hypothesis that this user or this persona has a given set of needs, you want to go out and understand from them. Are those articulated needs? Or are they unarticulated needs? Is there something below the surface that you hadn't thought of that you might actually be able to solve for? What does that mean to the type of product or service that you're thinking of offering? Direct observation is a really powerful tool. Understanding, putting yourself in their shoes, spending a day in their life, reading, understanding the type of macro trends, those are all important. But I'm a firm believer that by direct observation, you can truly understand and really start to empathize with what your persona or what your character is searching for.
As you build up that picture, go back to what you originally written down and understand, “Did what I think before…did I observe that? Did I hear that? Is it true? Is it jiving?” Use that as your filter to decide where to take you on the next part of the journey. It's really important to have an understanding of the problem that you're trying to solve and why. By having a persona or having a persona that's defined truly, truly and what's that need you're trying to solve really helps you focus on the problem. It's really easy to jump forward right into the solution and go running, and find out too late down the process that you're actually solving a problem that's maybe not so much of a problem. When you focus back on really getting detailed on who you're design target is and how they're going to interact and what jobs they're doing in the area in which you're trying to solve for today, you're going to get a much better understanding of what their problem state is. It let's you stress test whether your hypothesis of the problem you're trying to solve is an actual problem.
How many types of personas do you create? I think it depends on what you're trying to do. I've worked on projects and consulted on projects before where we had in the range of three to five. It helped us define distinct market segments, or distinct ways that we can position a benefit if the product was already created. More distinct ways in which
we could think about designing certain features, branding, or even the product itself based on our hypothesis on who the key user's gonna be. As we set up those multiple personas, they had to be different enough that what we learned about them would change the output of the work. And as we went through the learning process to understand and validate what we hypothesized about them, that allowed us to narrow the focus down to generally one, sometimes two depending on the product in question.
I once consulted on a product, a new product that was coming to the market that was for a female hair styling brand. It was still at this phase where it could change some of the chemistry so that it would have different end properties which left pretty side open opportunity in terms of how it could go to market. We had an understanding of what might fit from a benefit positioning state. So we wanted to kinda stress test that.
