Personas

December 8, 2005 11:37 am Dave Neary gnome

The marketing list has caught on to the idea of personas, we’re currently going through some iterations, and hopefully something useful will come out the other end.

A persona is a characterisation of someone who represents a target market. An imaginary character, with a background, a name, and some typical use-cases. It’s a way to make a reference to a need, and point to a “real” person, and explain why they have that need, and why it’s important. They’re often used as a tool in usability studies to describe an existing user base.

What do personas have to do with marketing, you might ask? Well, marketing has a number of stages – deciding on a target audience and positioning, then evaluating how we’re doing against that target, and if we’re not doing well, making sure people know that, and that we are moving to address our shortcomings. And obviously communication – telling people in our target audience why they should consider us, focussing on their needs as compared to what we offer.

A persona is a tool to ease communication through all of these stages.

We can agree, given a certain amount of detail, whether someone is in a target audience (“Of course Roger, the 37 year old marketing executive, is the kind of person who is likely to be interested in driving a Porsche!”)

We can use that person as a reference for our positioning (“does Jane, the 40 year old housewife who sticks friendly reminders for her husband to the fridge with a fridge-magnet really care that this moisturiser contains beta-kerotine? Then maybe we shouldn’t be talking about it in ads in the magazines she reads.”)

And internally, we can use personas as a yardstick for measuring the usefulness of features and as a usability tool.

The great thing about a persona is that you can get to know them – they have real needs and behaviour patterns which happen to roughly correspond to a target. They force you to avoid focussing too much on corner cases.

It’ll be interesting to see what gets produced. Particularly since this work will be complementary to the market segmentation work with the KDE promo group are cooking up at the moment.

2 Responses

  1. ingo Says:
    December 9th, 2005 at 10:02 pm

    “Personas” can help think about possible use cases However, please excuse me if I get tetchy when hearing examples from marketing. While one can certainly learn a lot from marketing people, there also a lot to be avoided, in my very personal and not so humble opinion 😉

    E.g., personas have a tendency to become dumbed down stereotypes with no relation to reality. To use the last example: while age, occupation and habits are important, “40 year old housewife” is so specific as to be useless. And why, exactly, would anyone think that from this description alone one could make the inference that she isn’t interested in the ingredients of moisturiser?

  2. Trista Says:
    December 23rd, 2005 at 7:43 am

    Hi– I just came across your description of personas. I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. A persona from the standpoint of user experience is not a representation of a market segment. There may be some overlapping demographics, but in my admittedly limited understanding of market terminology, a market segment is a group of buyers who may have similiar demographics. Segmentation is a useful tool to find out which groups of people you want to target, wheras a persona is a representation of a user group and it’s main purpose is to influence the design of a product, website, application, etc. Segmentation focuses mainly on demographics and things that may trigger buying. Personas focus more on goals and habits that may influence usage. I’m probably not explaining this that well– read http://www.cooper.com/newsletters/2002_02/reconciling_market_segments_and_personas.htm for more information about the differences between marketing segments and personas.