When running a business, knowing your customers is a pivotal part in branding and your design process. Online, it will go a long way in generating conversions and encouraging engagement. A user persona is the sum of your ideal customer built from in-depth research into your target audience to achieve the right results. With the right user persona in place, your company can then really start to grow. Here’s 5 steps to creating and defining your user persona.
Research
Unless you do your homework, you’re not going to be able to develop an efficient user experience. This will take a little time and some grafting as you collect data and undertake comprehensive research. With information on your users’ demographic, such as their age, gender, education, profession, income level, the physical, social, and technological context of the user, interests, motivations, and more, as well as how your users interact with your product, you can take your user experience from good to great.
Never assume
We suggest that your user persona is not created by just one member of your team, but as a collective group, so it can be as unbiased as possible, but objective at every opportunity. Every user persona is specific to the individual company, making it very unique, and for this reason your business should never make assumptions about your target audience, as you’d be surprised about how much they can vary.
Quality over quantity
To achieve the best design process, you will need to determine how many user personas you require. This can be a tricky task, but you may find the company has three or four different and integral users to get you started. Remember though, it’s quality over quantity, and although narrowing it down to such a small number can prove difficult, it will, however, give you the best possible outcome.
Be succinct
Try to keep your user persona to no more than two pages in length, and ideally you should contain one image. You want your user persona to be an accurate representation of your customer base, and so it’s important that the information is clear, concise, and to the point, not to mention correct, cutting any information you feel is irrelevant or unnecessary. With a clear representation in place, it will be easy for you and your team to identify your customers’ needs and adapt your design process and user experience accordingly.
Finishing touches
Before you call it a wrap, go back over and recheck everything, ensuring there’s nothing that you’ve missed which you consider important to the user journey, as well as the presentation of the information you’ve put together. Take pride in your persona profiles, taking the time to make them look great. If they are going up in the office for everyone to see, ensure everything is clear so the rest of the team can make the best use of them too.
If you’re looking for a team to help you with your digital web project, user experience or want to know more about how we can help your company grow through technology, please contact us today or call us on 0208 133 8210.