Armed with customers’ demographic, psychographic, and behavioral profiles and your knowledge of the four main temperaments, you are now ready to create your personas. You must keep a few important points in mind as you work through this process:
Creating personas is not the same as taking your customer demographic profiles and putting an image on them.
Personas will not always have a one-to-one relationship with each market segment because they focus more heavily on users’ online behavioral aspects.
Most websites will have four to seven primary personas. These should satisfy your most complex visitors. You can always create secondary personas that are not as strongly addressed throughout the site.
Personas are a generalization of the demographic, psychographic, and behavioral trends of your customers. Some of our clients try to map every little detail in their customer profiles into one of the personas we create. This is not correct.
The persona creation process is never done. Personas are works in progress. We make assumptions about the market, create the personas to match our assumptions, and continue to evolve them.
Personas grow and mature as we move forward with a project. Persona creation is a highly collaborative exercise, so we do not assign one single analyst to work on creating them. Usually a team of three or more analysts is working on this phase.
Although we will not go into great detail regarding the meticulous process of persona creation—since a single chapter can’t do it justice—we’d like you to bear in mind that a lot of mapping, assessment, testing, discussions, and research go into the process. The most difficult challenge is to map online behavioral trends to demographic trends. Our emphasis is on the online behavioral aspect, although demographic information from socioeconomic and gender perspectives applies to online behavioral trends as well, so both areas do go hand in hand.
Most of the time, you will start with 15 to 20 different customer profiles. We use these profiles to develop our initial 10 personas. We then merge some of these initial personas based on characteristics, behavior, and temperaments into our final primary personas. Let’s take an example of a few initial sketches we did for a medical uniforms website:
Candice Miller – 48, nurse, hospital – NY – Candice has been a nurse for over 15 years. She is married, 1 child, and makes around $49,343 a year. Candice loves unique prints. Candice is impulsive and caring. Candice relates well to reviews of products. Candice is concerned about security.
Clarissa Dubb – 21, medical assistant, clinic – Clarissa is completing an internship at a local clinic affiliated with her school in order to complete her degree. Not married. Long Beach, CA. Impulsive, aggressive. Clarissa is brand-conscious. She also likes newer designs and colors. As a student/employee, she has the flexibility of wearing what she wants. Clarissa reads the descriptions on the site to ensure that the design is exactly what she needs.
Senjay Gupta – X-ray technologist, 34, married, 2 children – hospital. Aggressive. Senjay is looking for comfort. Doesn’t mind paying extra for the best. Security concerns.
As you can see, these initial sketches of personas are not fully developed.
DON’T FORGET!
Never shut the door on the persona-creation process—it is a continuous work in progress. Every day you learn more about your market, and trends change, so a persona is never constant.
Relying on old data can be convenient and cost-effective, but ultimately you may be missing out on important market changes that will impact your bottom line and cost your company hundreds of thousands of dollars every month.