Persona Development
Effective web sites depend on accurate, relevant design personas. Mistakes made in the identification and creation of design personas generally come to light only after the site has been built and deployed. Correcting the problems caused by inaccurate personas, therefore, becomes an expensive, disruptive proposition. Getting personas right the first time is essential. Our process reduces the risk inherent in persona development.
Conventional persona development begins with qualitative research, usually through focus groups and interviews. Our process begins with Attitudinal Analytics® research, based on a huge sample of your actual site visitors. Because we capture their clickstream data and their demographics, attitudes, and visit metrics, we can validate what they say by what they actually do. We therefore know definitively:
- who comes to your site
- why they come
- the attitudes they arrive with
- the tasks they seek to accomplish
- how they go about accomplishing those tasks
- how successful they are
- how they feel about your site and brand
- how the site experience influences their likelihood of doing business with you in future
Because we identify the site’s primary personas from this statistically robust sample of thousands of actual visitors, the likelihood of our missing a key persona or even a key attribute is almost negligible -- and certainly far lower than would be the case for processes that start with focus groups.
Only when we have a clear picture of a site’s current visitors do we move to focus groups and one-on-one interviews, where we dig into the needs and experiences that formed your visitors’ attitudes towards your space, your brand, your products or services, and your competitors. We know, for each persona, the underlying motivators that influence the way they see your site and what they need from it, both now and in the future. This allows us to build the first part of our deliverable – the persona portrait.
The portraits are where conventional persona development processes end. We extend the depth and value of our deliverables, however, by creating a mental model for each persona. These mental models allow the web design team to play “what-if” games with the personas. Because the mental models show the designers how each persona thinks, they can throw design, content, or functionality ideas into the mental model and get a solid answer to how each persona would likely react to that idea.
Persona Development Deliverables
- Portraits of each persona delivered as Powerpoint slides.
- A mental model of each persona, comprised of up to 20 keys to how they think and how they will likely react to site ideas
- Training for the website design team in how to use the mental models
Contact Us and we will be happy to walk you through our process and our deliverables.
