Thinking in Personas is important for the BA too

Usually, the BA thinks in actors and roles. The UX designers think in Personas. The actor is someone with a specific set of rights who interacts with our application. The Persona is a specific subgroup of the actor, and the grouping attributes are based on common features of the group, which features make this group distinct from the others. Keeping that in mind, we will become better BA’s.

Let me just go through a theoretical case study to prove my point.

Let’s suppose that the task is to work out the requirements and the specification of a webshop, that sells cosmetics to ladies. At first sight, it’s not rocket science – one should be able to select a group of the products, then see the list of products of that group, get more details if she wants, add it to the basket, see and check the content of the basket, remove products from the list, and so on – we all see webshops already. It might work – that’s the usual way of course.

But if one starts to think about the target audience, then one might discover some interesting points. First of all – yeah sure, that’s cosmetics for ladies, the target audience are women. But then again, is it really so? Men might want to buy gifts for girlfriends, wives, female cousins. If one considers it twice, it is very likely that men will buy the most expensive cosmetics. Now we have the same actor – the buyer –but two personas – a young lady willing to buy cosmetics for herself (let’s name her Mary), and her loving husband (let’s name him John). Therefore, this webshop should serve ladies and men equally well. But that’s a problem.

I still remember when during a conversation, my wife said that she must buy primer because it’s all gone. Something like ?how about doing something on the next Monday?” ?Be it Tuesday, on Monday I’ll have to go shopping, my primer is used up.” So I thought I’ll give her one on the weekend, as a small present, just like that, you know. I went to the shop, and I was shocked. I told the lady what I am after, and she asked me, okay, which color? She show me a shelf, about two meters long, full of primers, all in different color and who knows what. (Later I solved my problem, but it’s out of scope by now.)

So you got the message – men usually know very few about cosmetics, therefore we should show up with some features that might help them. One possible feature could be offering a ticket to purchase, that the Significant One might use in the webshop to buy whatever she wants. But not everyone would like to reveal how much he spent – so the ladies should be asked at the very beginning whether they want to use their ticket. If they want, then only those products should appear that fit into the limits. We have to handle what happens with the ?change” – the amount that remains when there’s no product cheap enough for the remainder, etc. Of course there are alternative ways to achieve the same goal, but now we at least know that this goal might exist! All because we started to think not in role but in persona.

So the point is, just by considering who might use our application, we discovered a virgin area which might make sense to analyse further and ultimately implement. And this is the point when the interviews with the potential customers come into the picture. We have an idea, but we have to validate it. We should find out what would a lady feel, were she got such a ticket. Would she think it’s a bit annoying, that the husband/boyfriend hasn’t invested much efforts just money? Would she think it’s great because this way she might save the trouble of replacing the unneeded cosmetics? What would the men think about this option, would they find it useful?

Now you have the clue. You might want to think about it a while. It’s worth it.