By DAVE CHAFFEY
Published: February 2, 2007 on DaveChaffey.com

Web design personas

Modelling personas of website visitors is a powerful technique for helping increase the usability and customer centricity of a web site as part of a user-centred design (UCD) process.

Personas give a summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and environment of typical web site users.

Personas are essentially a ‘thumbnail’ description of a type of person. They have been used for a long time in research for segmentation and advertising, but since the mid 1990s have proved effective for improving web site design. Here are two simple examples for a music publisher wishing to sell music clips and sheet music to a business audience.

Persona 1 – George: George is a 45 year old violin teacher who has used the Internet for less than a year. He accesses the Internet from home over a dial-up connection. He has never purchased online before, preferring to place orders by phone.

Persona 2 – Georgina: Georgina is a 29 year old ad exec who has been using the Internet for 5 years

You can see that these are quite different types of people who will have quite different needs.

Customer Scenarios & customer journeys

Customer scenarios (customer journeys) are developed for different personas. Patricia Seybold in her book: The Customer Revolution, explains them as follows:

A customer scenario is a set of tasks that a particular customer wants or needs to do in order to accomplish his or her desired outcome.

You can see that scenarios can be developed for each persona. For an online bank, scenarios might include:

  1. New customer – opening online account
  2. Existing customer – transferring an account online
  3. Existing customer – finding an additional product

Each scenario is split up into a series of steps or tasks before the scenario is completed. These steps can be best thought of as a series of questions a visitor asks. These questions identify the different information needs of different customer types at different stages in the buying process.

The use of scenarios is a simple, but very powerful web design technique that is still relatively rare in web site design. Evidence of the use of scenarios and persons in sites are when the needs of a range of audiences are accommodated with navigation, links and search to answer specific questions. Clear steps in a booking process are also an indication of the use of this approach.

The approach has the benefits of:

  • Fostering customer centricity;
  • Identifies detailed information needs and steps required by customers;
  • Can be used to both test existing web site designs or prototypes and to devise new designs
  • Can be used to compare and test the strength and clarity of communication of proposition on different web sites.

-Can be linked to specific marketing outcomes required by site owners.

 




Guidelines on developing web design personas

These are some guidelines and ideas on what can be included when developing a persona. Start or end with giving your persona a name. The detailed stages are:

  1. Build personal attributes into personas:
  • Demographic: Age, gender, education, occupation and for B2B, company size, position in buying unit.
  • Psychographic: Goals, tasks, motivation
  • Webographics: Web experience (months), usage location (home or work), usage platform (dial-up, broadband), usage frequency, favourite sites
  1. Remember that personas are only models of characteristics and environment:
  • Design targets
  • Stereo-types
  • 3 or 4 usually suffice to improve general usability, but more needed for specific behaviours
  • Choose one primary persona whom, if satisfied means others are likely to be satisfied
  1. Different scenarios can be developed for each persona as explained further below:
  • Write 3 or 4, for example:Information seeking scenario (leads to site registration), Purchase scenario – new customer (leads to sale), Purchase scenario – existing customer (leads to sale).

Once different personas have been developed who are representative of key site visitor types or customer types, a primary persona is sometimes identified. Wodtke (2002) says:

“Your primary persona needs to be a common user type who is both important to the business success of the product and needy from a design point of view – in other words, a beginner user or a technologically challenged one”.

She also says that secondary personas can also be developed such as super-users or complete novices. Complementary personas are those that don’t fit into the main categories or display unusual behaviour. Such complementary personas help ‘out-of-box thinking’ and offer choices or content that may appeal to all users.

Guidelines on applying web design personas

1) Get sign off from all key stakeholders in business that these are accurate representations of their audience because if they disagree the personas won’t get used (which is what usually happens).

2) How personas are presented is also essential: Create pocket cards of people in projects to carry around, place on front of reports and documents to show who target audiences are, create life-size cut outs. One of our clients is even proposing using actors for a day so that staff and team members can ‘meet their personas’

3) Personas are used to help those in teams that might never meet the customer. Development team use them to ensure that as specs change (which they do) in a project life-cycle you don’t lose site of who you are designing and building for