Additional information on PERSONAs

From Alexandercovan.com

A Few Persona Fundamentals

1. A Name
They have a name- I like the convention ‘[first name] the [role]’, so ‘Andrea the Auditor’ or
‘Dave the Dispatcher’.
2. A Screener
Always start with a screening question you can use to identify subjects- even if you’re not
about to interview any, it would help make sure your persona is adequately specific. For
example, in the case of ‘Andrea the Auditor’ the screener might be ‘How many
accounting audits have you completed in the last three months?’.
3. A Description
This general description introduces the persona and answers questions like ‘Who are
they?’ and ‘What makes them tick?’. The ‘Day in the Life’ tool is a good way to step
through this.
4. A Perspective
As touchy-feely as they may seem, personas are a design tool, which means their main
purpose is to help you do some job (or several jobs) better. Use the popular ‘Think See
Feel Do’ points to help refine and focus the perspective we suppose the persona has in a
way that’s more operational.

Why do we need a PERSONA?

1. Make Better a Product/Offering

Let’s say there are these five fundamental jobs in the business of making stuff (in digital):

Here are a few questions you can expect your personas to help you answer (from the bottom
job moving up to the top):

PROPOSITION DESIGN
• What problems (jobs, desires, etc.) are at the top of this personas list?
• Which of the above has the greatest tension between how things are vs. how the
personas would like them to be?
• How will we make the customer aware of our new [product, feature]?
 • How might we test whether they actually care about our proposition (ideally before we
go make stuff)?
• How often would we expect them to use our new [product, feature]?
• What metrics would constitute success?
• What will we do if we see that the proposition isn’t resonating with them?
PRODUCT/SYSTEM SUPPORT
• How much explanation is required for our user to be successful with our [product,
feature]?
• How will we guide them to the above? How will we know if it’s working?
• How do we instrument the right observations into our support process so we’re
making the product easier?
PRODUCT DESIGN
• Who is our user?
• Based on products they actually use, what interface patterns and comparables would
be most relevant to the interface we want to build?
• How will they encounter this (product, feature)? How often will they use it? When?
Before and after what?
• What screeners should we use in finding subjects for usability testing?
SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT
• What happy paths and headline modalities should we prioritize in our test plan?
• I don’t understand this design. How did we learn/decide that’s a good thing for the
user? How will we know if it is?

2. Execute Better Promotion/Growth

Here are a few questions you can expect your personas to help you answer around the job of
selling stuff:
PERSONAS & SEGMENTS
• Who are our personas? What makes them tick?
• What do think think, see, feel, and do in our area of interest? (didn’t have to dig too
deep for those!)
VALUE PROPOSITIONS
• What problems (be those jobs, desires, habits) are important to our customers?
• What alternatives do they have today? What do they like vs. not like about those?
• What are we specifically doing that’s better? Why do they prefer our proposition?
BRAND EXPERIENCES
• How does the customer (or user) encounter our brand? What are the touch points?
• NOTE: I particularly recommend paying attention to touch points outside the ‘happy
path’- support, etc.
• How are we doing on those? What are they like for the customer?
BRANDING
• What do our customers actually think about/associate with our brand?
• What do they think about our competitive alternatives?
LEXICON
• What words and phrases does our customer actually use to talk about our area?
• (Are we using those phrases? Are we ranking for them in Google?)
ORGANIC CHANNELS
• Where do our personas go to find information and talk about our topic of interest?
ASSETS, ACTIVITIES, PAID CHANNELS, & PROMO INFRASTRUCTURE
• These don’t typically have obvious, direct relationships to personas, so I’ll skip them.
(Please comment below if you disagree!)

3. Write Better User Stories

Agile describes a set of ideas on how teams can produce better product working together in
small batches with inputs that are highly descriptive but not overly prescriptive. The inputs
and focal point about what to build are user stories and are structured as Epic Stories/ User
Stories/ Test cases or Acceptance criteria.

As a (PERSONA), I want (to do something), so that (I can derive a benefit).

You can see where personas slot into those inputs. Like writing anything else, you want to
make sure you understand your subject and have some compelling ideas about them.
Quality personas are key to providing the kind of smart, discussable, actionable, testable
inputs that make agile function well.

4. Facilitate Better Interdisciplinary Collaboration

When I see a high-functioning team that’s killing it on innovation, I see an interdisciplinary
team. There are a minimum of hand-off’s and maximum of meaningful collaboration.
Personas play a central role, anchoring the team’s point of view on what they’re making and
how they’re selling it:

A high-functioning team is constantly

a) using personas to create better, more testable ideas and then
b) encapsulating what they learn from testing those ideas back into their personas.

How do I make sure my persona is good?

To that end, inspired by Bill Wake’s INVEST acronym for thinking about user stories, I offer
you the REACT checklist:

REAL Go where the persona is and observe. If you want to create an app for
parents to distribute allowance to their kids, you should be taking a lot
of photos of chore lists. If you’re creating enterprise software for
customer care, you should be observing a lot of customer service rep’s.
Also, you’re creating a persona that represents the customer you have
now, not the one you wish you had. Their behaviors should represent
what you actually expect to see in the real world, not the behaviors you
might want to create with your product.
 Does the persona feel like a real person, or just a convenient
archetype? Is it based on talking to a substantial number of actual
subjects?

EXACT If the persona isn’t exact and distinctive, you’re back to the ‘males 25-
35…’ problem: the profile is so generalized it can’t drive any useful
action. Yes, bigger populations mean bigger markets but with such a
generalized understanding of the customer you’ll end up at the lowest
common denominator with your product and promotion. What happens
then? Your competitors will re-segment that market with material that’s
more relevant and steal it from you, piece by piece. The strongest
competitors hold their market piece by piece with product and
promotion anchored in relevant understanding of segments (personas)
of their market.
Does the persona feel like a real person, or just a convenient
archetype? Is it based on talking to a substantial number of actual
subjects?

ACTIONABLE If the persona doesn’t inform how you sell stuff and build stuff, why
bother? The Think-See-Feel-Do checklist (below) is a good way to help
the persona respond better to your operational questions. We’ll also be
reviewing groupings of problem scenarios, alternatives, and value
propositions as a way to link what you’re delivering to a testable view of
your persona.
Does the persona do a good job of supplying better, more testable
answers to your key questions (see section above on this). Could they
answer a question like ‘What’s the last movie this persona saw?’ and
be able to provide plausible answers about how they inferred their
answer from what you gave them?

CLEAR If you hand the persona to a colleague, do you they get a sense that
they know the persona?
Could they answer a question like ‘What’s the last movie this persona
saw?’ and be able to provide plausible answers about how they inferred
their answer from what you gave them?

TESTABLE How will you know if you’re right about this persona (because most of
the time you won’t be that right on the first go).
Specifically, is the persona specific enough to be testable through
discovery interviews? Do you routinely update it with new discoveries
you make in the field?

Focusing Perspective with Think-See-Feel-Do

Once you’ve humanized your persona, you’ll want to operationalize it in your particular area
(online banking, dating, shopping for power tools- whatever area you’re working). The Think-
See-Feel-Do checklist is a good way to do this.

THINK
This is your persona’s rational point of view in your area. What you really want to drive to
here is the tension between how things are now and how the persona would like them
to be. Here are a few example questions you might ask to get at this:
Tell me about how you [do whatever it is your product does]?
Tell me about the last time you [did that]? How did you decide to [do whatever it is]? What
was it like?
What are the top 5 hardest things about [doing whatever you do]?
If you could change one thing, what would it be? What about two things?

SEE
This is a description of how your persona arrived at the point of view you described in
Think. What observations and sources of information are relevant in your area? What or who
defines success or good practice? Here are a few example questions you might ask a
subject to get at this:
Where do you learn what’s new? What others do?
Who do you think is doing it right?
How did you make your last decision?

FEEL
This is the actual, emotional relevance of the personas thoughts and observations in your
area of your interest. This is one takes some practice- talking about emotions between
strangers isn’t that normal for most people. Also, using ‘feel’ as a synonym for ‘thinks’ doesn’t
count!
I find the best way to get at this is to step the subject through a specific example and then
ask them how that (the example) made them feel. Here are a few examples:
Tell me about the last time?
What motivates you? What parts of it are most rewarding? Why?

DO
This one’s important: you need to get at what they actually do in area and how often/how
much/with how much money they engage in the activity question. Remember,
useful personas should be ‘real’ and this should represent what they do now, not what you
wish they would do.