Identify Your Customer, Align Your Team and Boost Your Bottom Line with User Personas

Who are you really creating and designing your product or service for?

Let’s say your target audience is entrepreneurs. One teammate may have the expectation that entrepreneurs are most concerned about funding, whereas someone else may think that their main challenge is looking for partners. It becomes a battleground of who’s right and who’s not.

What we assume may not be true either. (Source: CIOL)

Everyone on your team has their own assumptions about what your target audiences’ goals, needs, and problems are. Being able to align your expectations and create a product that truly addresses your target audiences’ problems will lay the essential foundation to propel your business to success.

And nothing does that more effectively than creating a user persona to get everyone on the same page and identify the right user.

User persona explained

A user persona is a set of archetypical descriptions for a fictional target user of your product or service.

This is a user persona crafted by 55 Minutes for a project, looking into the context of a new hire in a mid-sized company

Crafting a user persona does not only mean defining their age, gender, demographics, but also what they do, what they care about, the problems that they are facing, and the goals they are trying to achieve. By understanding your target users’ psychology — motivations, expectations, and aspirations, you will be able to better empathise with them.

Why do you need it?

Using the phrase “target user” doesn’t tell you much about your target users’ characteristics or psychology. Your team might even get confused — who are you referring to?

Say your user persona is called Debbie. By referring to Debbie during meetings, it acts as a shorthand for all the characteristics, goals, and needs of your ideal customer. Everyone on the team can instantly have a similar set of expectations and it helps the team to align to the same goal of finding solutions to solve Debbie’s problems. No assumptions needed.

The value of calling your personas’ names and having a set of scenarios about them (background, motivations, expectations) also helps the entire team to acquire a human-centred mindset.

How so?

Treating youir target audience as a real person rather than target objectives will constantly remind your team that the end-user or service beneficiary is a person. The team will be inspired to come up with specific tangible solutions for Debbie.

Before you get too hasty and jump straight to the ‘how should I create one?’ process, let’s first circle back. Starting the process right will make sure that your user personas are used correctly after they are completed.

If user personas are important, why do people not use it after creating it?

Crafting a user persona is considered one of the “must-haves” for any business, but how many businesses really follow through with the process of using it for business strategy and marketing decisions? It can be really easy to abandon the user personas you constructed at the beginning of your product development phase and shelf them away forever.

Let’s go through a few reasons why they are not properly utilised and what can be done to maximise them.

1. Not everyone was involved in the creation process

Having someone in charge of the user persona creation process is a good idea. But not when the assigned person decides to take on the task all by himself.

Crafting user personas is an activity that requires all hands on deck. Everyone in the team should be present and getting involved — either they are asking questions or they are discussing and answering them. It’s important not to have a lone wolf who dictates the whole conversation or a secret covert group working on it privately.

A huge element that often determines the usefulness of your user persona is the initial buy-in. If everyone is deeply invested in the creation process, it means that the completed personas have gotten the stamp of approval from every single person on the team.

2. Not considering what is relevant to you

You need to make sure that your user persona is unique and relevant to your own business.

Start by choosing the right template. Always pause to consider how it relates to your product or service:

That’s how you can determine:

• If a section or question is relevant

• If you need to remove or add a section

For example, if your business is to provide a learning digital platform for primary school students, you need to include a ‘digital learning platform or channels’ section that your target customers (for instance, students) currently use and how frequently they use them.

If your business’ aim is to create an online e-book shopping platform, include which of the current platforms/channels they are frequently using.

For both cases, as the businesses involve digital platforms, we would recommend including a ‘device or technology’ usage section to learn about which devices, technology (such as apps and websites), and software they use.

This is an example of a user persona that 55 Minutes created for SpudnikLab, for a mobile device that they are creating. Take note of how the information is skewed towards a technology angle, which is relevant to their product.

Whereas, if you run a clothing label, you would know that such a section is irrelevant to you. Instead, you might want to consider which shopping malls or fashion stores your customer is going to.

3. Having broad and generic answers

A quick search for ‘user persona templates’ on google can bring you tons of results.

Some templates are free for all, which means they are designed for ANY company to use, regardless of industry, product, or service. The questions asked might be way too broad, and in turn, you might end up giving vague answers. And you don’t want that! This ties in with the previous point of choosing the right template to use.

The main purpose of having user personas is to understand a person’s (your representative target customer or user) specific needs, pain points, and motivations, within their specific context.

This inspires the team to come up with innovative and specific solutions that a person can resonate with. Naturally, the persona cards should encourage the team to think about the specific what, how, where, and why— and come up with focused solutions.

4. Not knowing how to use your user persona

Okay great, you have created your user personas! What now?

Here are three practical ways you can proceed:

Next step: Creating user personas

The last thing you want is for your team to say, “it’s useless! We did it before but have never used it.” And that becomes a reason for them to not create user personas again down the road.

Are you now better equipped to lead your team to create user personas? Bravo!

In the next article on user personas, we take you through the user persona creation process — when you should do it and how to fill it up. 

—

A version of this article was originally published on the Potato Productions website and was written by Lynette Lee and Hye Yoon, Min as a collaboration between Potato Productions and 55 Minutes.

If you’re interested in learning more about our work, you can reach out at hello@55mins.com.

—

Hye Yoon is a UX researcher at 55 Minutes. She has a Bachelor’s in furniture and spatial design from Seoul, South Korea, and has a Master’s in Helsinki, Finland. Currently, she lives in Singapore, observing her surroundings from the lens of a tourist from time to time. She loves nature and goes cycling every weekend in the Northeast region of Singapore.