What's a persona?
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions around two things:
Getting unstuck in business and life
UX - personas and user journeys and touchpoints.
Well, guess what? I’m going to give you an answer to BOTH of those - together :-) Talk about maximizing efficiency.
First topic: Being Stuck.
To get unstuck you must first figure out what unstuck means to you! Sounds obvious? Well, do you remember the last time you weren't stuck? Do you know what was happening around you? Do you know WHO was around you?
Too many times we get stuck when we are serving and focusing on solving problems for the wrong person. I had a client who was miserable at work. She could see problems in her workplace, and their solutions, but had no drive to fix them. Her guilt trip was legendary! Lucky for her, we did a quick exercise and found out she was miserable because she was solving problems for....you guessed it....the wrong person!
We clarified WHO that right person was and lo and behold! her life smoothed out, things began to flow, her solutions were targeted for the right person, and she had the ENERGY to make things happen again.
What was that tool you might ask?
The tool that helped her understand who she should have been solving problems for (and it could do the same for you), is a UX (user experience) tool called a Persona.
What's a Persona?
Personas help you clarify a target client by asking the right questions to step into their shoes, and understanding their world. If you are targeting the wrong person as your target client, doing their persona helps you uncover that you could care less about their problems. When that happens, that’s a sign you need to dig deeper to find a new persona. And when you finally land on the right persona, they resonate, and you get into a groove when you know you got it!
Top companies use personas to sell great products. I use personas everywhere - at work, with my family, friends, new businesses, even romance! It really helps me speak in a way that other people need to hear.
If you’ve never used personas, I’ve got a treat for you! I created a tutorial for you, complete with the persona definition, explanation and example. Take a watch, then share it with someone who can use the info!
If you’re on your mobile, and bandwidth is at a premium, here’s the video transcript for you:
Are you interested in creating and using personas? Watch this video and I'll show you how to make and use one. I'm Elena Astilleros and I share tools and skills that will help your organization do even more great work. Subscribe to my channel so you can be notified whenever a new video comes out.
Customers and clients interact with you on a daily basis. By the end of this video, you're going to know how to use personas to interact with your clients in a smarter way. I've used personas with large organizations and small organizations to help businesses improve the quality of their products for their customers. And today, you're going to learn exactly how to do it too.
First thing first, let's talk about what a persona is. A persona takes all your clients and customers, and by now I hope you have a few, and it smushes them down into one archetypical character that you can use to make decisions. Now, you can use this to have discussions. You can use this archetype to personalize your work so that you're not building a future, you're building a product to solve a need.
Now, that the definition is out of the way, we can talk about how to create a persona. And this part's super simple and fun, especially if everybody is in the same room. You can just create a persona using one of these. Okay. Before we write anything on this persona, the important thing to realize is that this persona can be changed later. What the purpose of this exercise is is for you to get in the mind of the people who are paying their hard-earned money to keep you in business. So, what's important to them? What do they want? Who are they? Because the more you know about that, the better your products and services can be for them.
So, I'm just going to show you a blank persona. And, mind you, there are many, many, many riffs on this persona template. What you want to do is customize it to what serves your needs. The first thing you want to do is put a nice big box here. It is going to be for the picture. You actually want to put a picture of your persona in there later. When we go through the example in a second, I'll show you exactly what that looks like. The next thing is you want to name your persona. So you're going to put 'name.' You're going to figure out what their age is. And you're going to add their profession.
So, let's talk about their goals. What do they want? What are their stressors? What's stressing them out right now? Stressors. Because that's going to show you, that's going to give you a little bit of empathy onto everything that's coming their way. I mean, right now, most people are really busy, right? So, that's probably one of the things that you do, what want to put down is busy if it pertains to your customer. So, we'll get to that. And it's stressors and pain points because that's going to show you, that's going to give you a little bit of empathy onto everything that's coming their way.
What do they hear? And by this, I mean, what are people telling them they have to do? Another one that's really good is what are they thinking? What is going on in their head? I know we talked about what their goals are but what's really going on in their head? Key to this is that you want to give a headline to your persona. So, you want to give them a tagline that will sum them up in a second.
There's many other questions that you can pull but I'm just telling you this low-tech, simple way to do it. Go online, Google "user personas," and you'll find all of these templates. And you can just start pulling. There's some that say "introvert," "extrovert." There's many other questions that you can pull and just add them to this.
Before we go to the example, I want to hear, now that you kind of have this template for creating a persona, what is the name of your persona? Now remember, the name of your persona gets to reflect who they are. Share with me in the comments below what your persona's name is.
Let's take this through an example. I'm going to use American sports fans, and specifically football fans, as the example. I think a sports fan in one part of the world is very similar to a sports fan in other parts of the world. There's a lot of passion. This guy's so excited. You don't even know. Yeah. Mike is his name. He needs a little bit of money to be able to buy a lot of these memorabilias and be an amazing sports fan. I'm going to put in 45. He's a mid to senior-level manager. And his goal is for his team to win. His goal is also to support his team the best way he can, to really just give his team lots of support because if he supports his team, they're going to win.
His stressors or pain points, well, let's see. When they lose. And budget concerns can be a big stressor. Budget and time, right? Time is such a big stressor. So, what's their community pressures? So, say this is Mike. He's an Eagles fan, Eagles football fans, living in L.A. So, how does Mike create that sense of being connected with his team? That's his community pressure, is he's lost his community.
What are they thinking? Here's the thing. They're thinking and here's... Actually, I'm going to put it in his tagline. They're thinking "E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles." E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles. That's their chant. So, what are they thinking? They thinking they want to win. They want to have fun. They want their team to win. Your Eagle's franchise can then take this and make better decisions with it.
Speaking of better decisions, let me show you how else you can use your user persona. Whenever you're developing something, so I am the owner of the Eagles franchise or the merchandising department, I'm going to actually start talking about I want this hat or I'm deciding between two types of patterns for my next logo and I'm like, "Well, which one is Mike going to like more?" It's no longer, "Which one should I choose? There's so many fans." You're now choosing for Mike because Mike has become the amalgamation of all Eagles fans. Now, you can also take Mike's persona and you can use Mike through a user journey. And that allows you to see how Mike interacts with your brand, what Mike's doing before Mike makes a decision to buy anything from your brand, what Mike [inaudible 00:06:50] using your brand items after. And you can start making better decisions on more of what Mike wants and needs.
Here's the final thing. Here's a tip. When you have your personas, sometimes something's going to be a little off. What if you have a different, totally different persona? What if you have a teenage woman or a young woman who loves going up into the bleeder seats and goes for a different reason than Mike? Then you can actually realize you have two different personas.
A final thing you can do with your persona is you can validate your persona. Is this really your amalgamation of your client base? Is it one person? Sometimes, when you're actually making it to make decisions and the decisions aren't working, it might be that either you need to adjust. Maybe the ages is not correct or maybe the income is off or what they want or what they need, you can adjust this. But sometimes, it might actually be that you need two personas. And so, you need to develop a second one to discuss a whole different set of needs and a whole different person so that you can market better to them.
I've just taken you through a really quick and dirty way to develop a persona. But, to be honest, developing a persona is better done in a workshop because you could get lots of minds together to solve the problem and really calibrate who you're serving. I've created a guide on how to run great workshops and it tells you the steps on what to do before, during and after a workshop to get the best results. Follow the links in the comments below and I'll take you to where you can get that guide.