Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data and insights. They help you understand your customers' needs, goals, behaviors, and pain points, and design better experiences for them. In this article, you will learn how personas help you empathize with your customers and improve your customer journey mapping.
Personas are not just generic profiles or segments of your target audience. They are detailed and realistic descriptions of specific individuals who represent your ideal customers. They usually include demographic information, such as age, gender, location, and income, as well as psychographic information, such as motivations, frustrations, preferences, and values. They also include a name, a photo, a quote, and a scenario that illustrates how they interact with your product or service.
We helped a tech company developing a fitness app and created two personas: "Fitness Fiona," a 30-year-old busy professional who values quick, effective workouts and "Marathon Mark," a 45-year-old avid runner focusing on endurance training. Fiona helps us understand the needs of users looking for short, varied workouts and nutrition tips. Mark represents users who need advanced tracking for running, detailed statistics and long-term goal setting. Although those personas are fictional to represent different user types, they are based on user research and include details like demographics, behaviour patterns, motivations and goals. They guide the app’s feature development, ensuring to cater the needs for both types of users effectively.
As pessoas n?o s?o todas iguais, mas assemelham-se. Persona é a identifica??o desses grupos com, principalmente, comportamentos e expectativas semelhantes.
Personas ou Usuários Extremos s?o uma ferramenta de Design para gerar conex?o e maior conhecimento sobre caracteristicas socio comportamentais. é uma ferramenta estratégica para que gestores e designer possam compreender seus diferentes tipos de clientes em uma perspectiva mais humana. Geralmente um negócio chega a ter até 10 personas mapeadas, contudo em média entre 4 e 5 personas têm freqüência relevante no negócio.
Personas provide a fictional representation of your target customers, helping you understand their needs, preferences, and challenges. By creating and using personas, you can empathize with the diverse perspectives within your audience, guiding product development and communication strategies to better resonate with your customers' experiences. However, Do you have clients journey mapped? If your response is no, it’s better to start by understanding your customer journey <as is> and use the personas map to help you evolve to a better <to be>. Once you have clear personas, you can delve into the specific experiences and touchpoints they encounter, creating a comprehensive journey map that aligns with their needs and expectations.
Personas are important because they help you empathize with your customers and see the world from their perspective. They help you avoid making assumptions or generalizations about your customers, and instead focus on their specific needs and expectations. They also help you communicate and collaborate more effectively with your team, stakeholders, and partners, by creating a shared understanding of who you are designing for and why.
They should focus in on how your customers feel and the emotional side of their decision making as much as the quantitative aspect if not more so
Personas are essential, fostering empathy and understanding of target audiences. By relying on user research, personas help reduce assumptions and biases, leading to solutions that genuinely resonate with users. Personas also promote consistency and alignment within teams, enhancing communication and enabling more targeted and effective design and marketing strategies. While personas are indeed powerful, they aren't always the best fit for every project. In situations like niche markets or projects with well-established user bases, other tools and methods can be more effective, such as ethnographic research, feedback loops and behavioural analytics.
Personas are crucial because they help platforms and CX professionals understand their users better. By creating specific, relatable characters, teams can move beyond abstract data and start to think about users as real people. This aids in designing products, services and experiences that are more user-centric, ensuring that they meet the real needs and wants of their target audience.
Identificar os comportamentos e expectativas de cada persona que se relaciona com sua marca é imprescindível para personalizar a experiência. é complexo atender expectativas, se n?o as entende. Identificar as personas e compreender suas expectativas, torna o trabalho mais objetivo, personalizado e assertivo.
To create personas, you need to conduct user research and collect data and insights from your existing or potential customers. You can use various methods, such as interviews, surveys, observations, analytics, or feedback, to gather information about your customers' behaviors, attitudes, and opinions. You then need to analyze and synthesize the data, and identify patterns and themes that reveal different types of customers. You can use tools, such as affinity diagrams, empathy maps, or user stories, to organize and visualize the data. Finally, you need to select the most relevant and representative types of customers, and create personas for each of them.
The ability to visualise what a customer looks like is critical to our ability to relate to their needs you cannot assume that everyone in a persona group thinks or acts as one even within a group their are big differences
I was in a development project of a mobile app aimed at helping young professionals manage their finances more efficiently. begins by conducting research to understand their target users. We gathered data through surveys, interviews, and observing potential users by focusing on the financial habits, challenges, technology use and lifestyle of young professionals. Then we created a detailed persona named "Alex" who is a 28-year-old marketing professional living in a metropolitan area. We conceptualised a full body of Alex with his demographics, goals, lifestyle, technology use and - of course - pain points for financial planning.
Creating customer personas involve couple of critical steps: 1) Conduct a thorough user research - Gather data through methods like surveys and FGDs 2) Identify patterns and insights by looking for common behaviours, motivations and challenges among your users 3) Based on your findings, create different groups that represent key user types 4) For each group, create a detailed profile that includes a name, demographic details, behaviours, goals and challenges 5) Test your personas with real users or stakeholders to ensure they are accurate and useful.
Aqui temos o primeiro ponto: n?o se cria personas, mas se identifica. A identifica??o pode ser feita de diversas formas, como por exemplo, analisando dados de comportamento de compra e navega??o, analisando comentários e feedbacks, mas principalmente falando com os clientes, de forma metodológica, utilizando da abordagem de design de servi?o.
Using personas throughout the design process allows you to ensure that your decisions and actions are aligned with the needs and goals of your customers. Personas can be used to define the problem or opportunity to be solved or created, generate ideas and solutions that address customer pain points and desires, evaluate and test them with customers, and communicate and present them to stakeholders. This helps explain how the ideas and solutions benefit customers.
By the help of persona, as product design teams, * we define the problem around "Alex’s" challenges. * we ideate product features to match his goals. * we build a prototype keeping "Alex’s" tech-savviness and lifestyle in mind and test it with people who match his profile to gather feedback. * we iterate based on feedback. * we present the product to stakeholders based on the persona to explain our design choices.
Some of the ways in which personas can actually help would be in: - Guiding of product development - Use personas to keep user needs at the forefront when making design and feature decisions - Tailor your marketing efforts to address specific needs, behaviours and preferences of each persona - Design experiences that resonate with different user types, improving satisfaction and engagement - Use personas as a common language to help diverse teams to understand and focus on the user.
Customer journey mapping is a technique used to visualize and understand how customers interact with a product or service across different touchpoints and stages. It can help identify opportunities and gaps in customer experience, as well as improve it. Personas are useful for customer journey mapping by providing an empathetic view of customers' emotions, thoughts, and actions throughout their journey. Personas also help segment customers based on their needs, goals, and behaviors, enabling you to prioritize the most important touchpoints and stages for each persona. Ultimately, personas can inspire you to create personalized and relevant experiences that meet or exceed customers' expectations.
You need to be able to see how different personas actually have significant differences to the mass view and then decide if you want to or can afford to accommodate those variables in terms of defining a specific experience for that group
Personas are integral to customer journey mapping because they allow you to envision how different types of users interact with your product or service. By understanding the specific needs, behaviors and pain points of each persona, you can map out unique journeys. This helps in identifying key touchpoints , understanding user experiences at each stage, and highlighting opportunities to enhance overall customer experience.
Personas help us humanise customer journey mapping by transforming abstract data into relatable profiles, enabling teams to empathise with diverse user experiences. They facilitate the journey analysis for different user segments, revealing specific pain points and opportunities. This approach ensures consistency across various touchpoints and guides personalised customer experiences. Personas can enhance communication and alignment across departments, fostering a unified approach to improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
We had initiated a redesign project for a mid-sized edtech company for its flagship e-learning platform. The management team insisted on using their current persona, and yet several misconceptions influenced the project success. 1 - Persona had been created based purely on their assumptions and intuition, without conducting any user research. 2 - Persona was adopted as the sole version for their multiple projects across different products. 3 - Since they preferred using one persona, design decisions were solely based on catering to that persona's needs, ignoring the diversity of the actual user base. 4 - Although their user demographics evolved over time, their persona remained same, leading to a growing disconnection with its users.
Lots of great advice and perspectives here, but also consider that personas aren't always the right approach (or least be mindful of the limitations). Personas can be great to enable empathy and keep the end user front of mind - "what would Kathy want?" - but if you're designing only for Kathy, it's potentially a very specific solution. Kathy isn't actually real, or if she is then it's a very narrow definition. Instead, consider defining archetypes (or just call them customer profiles if archetype sounds too academic). An archetype is more like a personality type than a named and defined individual. It's a broader definition that helps you to design for user needs, but without the myopic focus of a (fictional) persona.
Personas are a fantastic tool for building empathy, helping your stakeholders to relate to your customers, and adding context to the jobs to be done. However, they do carry a risk of creating or re-enforcing biases, particularly in diverse populations. Too often companies fall into the trap of creating personas that only reflect one cultural background, or if they do represent multiple backgrounds they do so in a tokenistic way. For this reason, I like to use personas in balance with less character-based tools like empathy maps, and archetypes.