How to build and use personas

· 3 minute read · via Punchkick
A man in a work apron leans over a tank in an industrial workshop, a chain hanging beside him.

This post is adapted from the Using audience personas to improve digital user experience strategy guide, on why traditional audience segments miss the mark and how psychographic personas can lead to success today.

1. Interviews, interviews, interviews

Building psychographic personas is a qualitative research engagement involving lots of interviews with members of the audience being profiled. Find an interviewer or vendor that is well-versed in psychographic personas. Agencies specializing in digital or marketing often use personas for designing interfaces, but an expert interviewer will know what kinds of questions to ask. Don’t be afraid to ask for samples of past personas to ensure that they center around psychographics.

Over the course of many interviews, patterns begin to naturally emerge among the participants as they fall into predictable “types” of interviewees. Once you can predict the second half of the participant’s interview based on the first half, you know you’ve identified a persona. The number of interviews it takes just depends on how sure you want to be. Personas for experience design should include in-person observation sessions where the user can be seen interacting with the product, preferably in the context of a real-life scenario.

Once you can predict the second half of an interview based on the first half, you’ve identified a persona.

2. Use available data

Personas can’t be built exclusively through surveys or quantitative methods because those methods won’t reveal goals and motivations. Data can show which purchases are being made, for example, but it can’t show the reasoning behind why customers pick that product. However, quantitative data can be a very helpful part of the process.

  • Analytics show where clusters of users are behaving in similar patterns, which is a strong indicator that they belong to the same segment.
  • Consumer data can inform what types of people should be sourced as interview participants.
  • Anecdotal evidence can come from case histories or people who interface with the audience on a regular basis (customer service associate, recruiter, sales, etc.)
  • Existing market/audience research is always informative.

If no other data sources exist, though, it’s fine to build personas based on interviews alone.

3. Build profile cards

Personas are typically represented as a series of profile cards complete with faces, names, and maybe even ages, jobs, personal interests, or common quotes. The more they are fleshed out as real people, the easier it will be for designers to empathize with them and for stakeholders to keep them in mind whenever they’re making decisions that affect the audience.

A persona profile card for Josef, a “Casual Explorer”: his photo, occupation and strategy, what moving up means to him, what he looks for as a job seeker, his goals, and the communications he loves.

A persona profile card for Elina, an “Ambitious Artisan”: her photo, occupation and strategy, what moving up means to her, what she looks for as a job seeker, her goals, and the communications she loves.

Whenever possible, demographic traits of the fictional people should represent actual trends found during research, rather than assigned randomly. A job well done is when stakeholders with customer-facing roles think the completed personas seem familiar and not at all surprising. After all, they already know these people quite well.

4. Get to know your new friends

Once the personas have been built, they’re ready to be used for brand positioning, marketing campaigns, new product ideation, customer experience improvement, and more. To promote a customer-centric mindset, it’s important to socialize the personas and make sure everyone understands them inside and out. Post the profiles in a highly visible area and refer to them by name. “How would Kevin feel about this change? What about Amanda?” It’s typical for organizations to focus their efforts on one or two target personas.

Ideas for next steps:

  • Run a brainstorm session to generate ideas about messaging, features, or channels that would speak to each persona, without worrying about the feasibility of the ideas. Experience professionals can create a map to start identifying areas for improvement in existing products or services.
  • Experience maps or customer journeys are visual graphs that show how each persona moves through the experience, particularly services or products that seek to evolve relationships with users over time. Based on what we know about each persona’s goals and mindset, how might they react to each touchpoint? How might their view of the brand change as the relationship progresses?