Like any product or service, you want your colleagues to get the most out of your wellbeing Proposition. But how can we deliver value if we don’t know who we’re serving?
That’s where user personas come in.
User personas are not only an invaluable tool for understanding the needs and behaviours of your people, but they can be extremely useful to inform your communications strategy.
First, what is a user persona?
A user persona is a fictional character used to represent specific audiences within your organisation.
User personas characterise demographics, attitudes, values, and the behaviours of your user segments, and are helpful for distilling key information from large data sets into more actionable stories.
These personas are developed with both quantitative and qualitative intelligence by using data that you’re already compiling but also by talking to your people to better understand their needs, motivations, and behaviours.
Why user personas are important
User personas enable to you understand your audiences, which is critical to developing a wellbeing proposition that’s highly engaged in. These personas inform service design and development, routes to “market”, and communication strategies.
Here are five ways that user personas will add value to your work:
- People are beyond numbers – Rather than just looking at data, user personas bring your target audiences to life. These characters that you’ve created have real behaviours, patterns, needs, preferences, and personalities which reflect the people you’re trying to engage with.
- Better meet the needs of your people – Buy making your target audiences more human you can create services that better meets their needs. You can create a more emotional connection and experience instead of merely transactional.
- Improves marketing effectiveness – Where does your audience(s) hang out? Data might suggest that it’s your intranet, because that’s where it’s collected, but your user persona suggests that it’s a departmental Facebook group. By knowing your users, you can spread awareness much more effectively.
- Delivers better user experiences – When we use our user personas alongside data, the chances that the final user experience will resonate with your target audiences is significantly higher. This is because we know more about how our users will navigate our service, what’s important to them, and the needs that we’re trying to fulfil.
- Increases engagement – When you’re able to visualise each user persona it makes it easier for you to make pathways to engagement in your service. It gives you the ability to anticipate objections and barriers to entry, put in measures to overcome them, and create a better experience for everyone.
Developing your own user personas
Now that we know why user personas are important, here are six steps to help you make your own:
- Segment your audiences – Every project is different, so different personas will be needed. First, identify the people that you’re trying to engage and find general commonalities between them.
- Determine what problems your service is solving – How is your service making your audience’s lives easier? What value does it add to the employee proposition?
- Customer characteristics – Who are your users? Are they mostly men or women? How old are they? Do they live close to the workplace or do they have long commutes? What are their working hours? Where do they hang out? How do they get information? This list of question is non-exhaustable, and will be dependent on your own workforce.
- Barriers and objections – What barriers and objections get in the way of engaging with your wellbeing proposition? How can these barriers be overcome?
- Talk to real people – One of the best ways to validate your proposition is to hear it straight from your users. Create focus groups, questionnaires, pulse surveys, road shows; whatever you need to get genuine feedback from your targeted audiences.
- Bring your user personas to life – Once you’ve collected, tested, and refined all this information, you’re ready to create your user personas. Give them a name, a photo, and make them easy to remember, empathise with, and shareable with your team.
Summarise all this information into a short one-page document that’s easy to refer to when planning your services and communication strategies.
This document is an investment into the success of your work. If you’re not thinking like your users you’re not going to get the outcomes your work deserves.
Everyday Juice Limited
We believe that everyone has the right to be healthy and happy at work, connected to a community of colleagues who are passionate about making a positive impact on themselves and the workplace.
If you want to create a remarkable place to work for your employees, why not?get in touch.
