This post is a continuation of an article I wrote on‘The importance of buyer personas and how to target them based on behaviour’.
This article made a few assumptions as to how buyer personas can be defined based upon user behaviour rather than on user research.
In this article we will now address user research and how this can be used when defining user personas for your products.
User personas
We identify user personas based upon demographic data such as age, location, gender, race and psychographic information such as personality, values, attitudes, lifestyles, interests and pain points.
This information can be gathered from Google Analytics, customer surveys, customer interviews, stakeholder meetings and research.
Personas help us to tailor a businesses’ marketing and promotions, improve communications and drive conversions at each stage of the customer journey.
Personas can be polarizing because of their perceived usefulness to the business.
For example, when taking into account demographics how valuable are customer statistics such as age or the number of people in a household or where they come from?
How valuable are these demographics in identifying personas? Studying the behaviours, lifestyles, needs and problems of these personas would make more sense.
On the other hand, psychographic information such as peoples’ behaviours, attitudes, needs and habits give us a more holistic view of these user groups.
In this respect, we are learning more about what motivates them to do something and not simply knowing who they are.
Personas are key in the design process, they give us a reference and gut check that we can come back to when we need to make a key creative decision in design.
By knowing who your customers are you can make better decisions for your business rather than making decisions based solely on assumptions.
In this respect, we only build features for a website that provide a solution to the requirements or needs of the user.
If there is no need, then the feature should not be built even if stakeholders in the business think differently.
When it comes to creating personas we should avoid creating them based on assumptions but rather on research that has been made from real people.
Try and humanise personas and give them names and descriptions.
For example, 'Simon the impulsive buyer’, who makes purchases based on discounts and sales messages.
Knowing this information and how to best service his needs will direct the design decisions that we make.
How to find people for user research interviews
According to Sarah Doody, UX Designer, one way is to initially seek out recruiting firms but these can be very expensive and take a while to find candidates.
Another less expensive route would be to try and find people to interview on your own with the objective of exploring the industry, getting insights and seeing how interviewees think.
Where do you find these people?
We can look on Facebook and Twitter groups and online communities.
Post questions explaining that you are doing research on, for example, a running app and is there anyone interested in completing a questionnaire or talking for a short period of time in exchange for a gift card?
Moreover, you could also tweet or respond to an Instagram post to get an influencer’s attention and send a gift card as appreciation.
Look at competitors and see what people are writing about the industry.
Search on social media, for apps on running and tweak search terms and get into the heads of people in order to find material.
Doody, recommends using an online directory such as Craig’s list in order to find interviewees.
Craigslist is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, sale items, discussion forums, etc.
Sarah initially screens people by being specific as to whom she wants to talk with.
A question that she may ask is:
'I’m doing research about running and I’m going to be talking to people on these dates and times. The call will take 30mins and you will get a gift card, if this sounds like you please click the link and complete the form'.
The form has deeper questions and based upon the feedback you can decide who you want to talk with.
If the product in question is already on the market you can talk to power users and people that tried it and left.
Find out what they liked about the product and what they didn’t.
This feedback is invaluable in creating a product that ticks all the boxes because the product is not being built on assumptions but on hard user research.
After we have identified our user personas we have a better understanding as to how we are going to tailor our website design to their needs.
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