Persona Development

Personas are character sketches that serve to focus design and strategy decisions. Creating a general depiction of customers as if they are someone one knows personally can help inform important decisions about marketing, advertising, content creation, product or service development, member support, public relations, pricing, and sales.

We only create personas based on real data. In our many years of experience using personas and observing their use in organizations, we have found that if they are data-driven (i.e. based on real people and real research findings), personas can be incredibly useful as a north star to the organization. If, however, they are constructed with fictional information, or too much “fluff,” they can be a detriment and less than helpful.

Our persona projects take different forms but they tend to follow a “broad to focused” data collection protocol to truly understand the customer base before creating the personas themselves. One such recent project consisted of the following research activities:

1. “Intercepts” at business branches across key markets in the U.S. where we interviewed customers who were there to transact business. The conversations were short, focused, and based on the customer’s real experience.

2. Focus groups: conducted across pre-determined locations to dive deeper into the customer’s preferences, beliefs, unmet needs, and desires.

3. Contextual Depth Interviews: conducted at the customer’s home or office. These customers were selected from the focus groups as persons of particular interest to the research team.

4. Affinity analysis: The Progress UX research team performed several data synthesis activities, including an affinity analysis

   of all of the data collected to group feedback into “need statements” and themes.

5. Resulting data-driven themes and needs statements informed the development of 4 primary customer personas, and 2 “anti-personas,” which were customer segments the product team was advised not to focus on.

As our client deliverables are proprietary, please schedule time with us to discuss more specifics about how we’ve helped designers, developers, and stakeholders understand and empathize with the end users’ needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals using personas.