Personas can be a fantastic tool to align and iterate around the customer hypothesis for a new product development initiative. A persona is effectively a fictional representation of the target customer, with demographic and psychographic information included.
DI uses personas, archetypes and customer journeys, coupled with in-depth stakeholder research, as part of our new product development toolkit to validate our customer, problem and solution hypotheses.
This is the template we often use for client engagements. Feel free to modify it to match your brand and/or otherwise suit your needs. We hope you find it helpful!
Why use a persona?
When embarking on a new product development process, we often argue for identifying a beachhead market – a small, specific group of customers who represent the ideal target customer for a product.
Even if it has larger aspirations, starting with a focused customer simplifies and brings clarity to everything you do.
- It makes the value proposition easier to identify and communicate.
- It makes identifying the core experience easier.
- It makes all marketing messages more focused.
- It makes channel identification for distribution easier.
A persona is a fantastic tool in support of this. It helps you put “meat on the bones” of who your customer is. Not just how old they are, what gender they are, and where they live. But also what their hopes, frustrations, aspirations and challenges are.
A persona is also a great way to distill insights gathered from customer development interviews into a single, concise representation of the target customer.
Ways to use personas
Sometimes personas get a bad wrap. Agencies will often use them as an intermediate deliverable, but don’t have the discipline to keep referring to it over time. It gets made and then ignored.
But it doesn’t need to be that way. In the ideal world, the persona comes with you throughout the rest of the product validation and design process. Specifically, personas can help:
- Make product functionality decisions. You can ask yourself “how likely is Jennifer to use this feature?”
- Determine flows between screens. You can ask yourself whether the ways interfaces create friction or confusion. This can be particularly useful during onboarding and first time UX.
- Figure out how to build habit creation loops. By understanding how your user will fold this product into their lives, you can architect that kinds of loops that build habits and drive long-term retention.
- Nail down targeting for acquisition. Personas can be a useful tool for onboarding marketing, PR and other resources to assist in the creation of messaging, determine channel/market fit, etc.
How to create a persona
The process is fairly straightforward:
- Collect qualitative data from stakeholders. The best personas tend to be informed by the market. Stakeholder interviews, shadowing exercises and other ethnographic tools can help tease out nuance and bring personas to life in a way that can be hard to capture using simple demographic data.
- Supplement with quantitative. Surveys can be useful in fleshing out qualitative, since they can typically provide more coverage at scale. You can also explore analytics, customer support logs if you have them, market research reports, etc. But these should all be secondary to primary research, unless you don’t have it.
- Create the persona. Generally this includes a name, photo, quick bio, demographic data, and pains/frustrations. Folks will often add additional detail depending on the primary use case – for folks doing social media content planning, they might look at influencers and brands they follow. For product designers they might look at apps they use and like. One note of caution – don’t get too cute with the biographical details – the point is to make seem realistic, not real. You don’t want to get too prescriptive or lean on those anecdotes too heavily.
- Iterate. As you go through the rest of the the product development process, you will inevitably learn things that either augment or contradict the original persona you created. It should be a living document – update it as that information becomes available.
Download our free persona template.
This is the template we often use for client engagements. Feel free to modify it to match your brand and/or otherwise suit your needs. We hope you find it helpful!