Digital Design Blog

Going Post-Personae

Personae are dead! Well, not quite, but to maintain their potency as a design tool, we need to broaden our perspective of how they function—we need to move personas beyond archetypes of users interacting with Web sites, and consider the role of personas within the context of a larger experience.

For those of you unfamiliar with personas, they are representations of people who share similar needs, goals, attitudes, and behaviors in the context of using a Web site or product. Traditional personas are derived predominantly from qualitative ethnographic research and are used as a litmus test for designing relevant user experiences.

Currently, the predominant model for developing personas and the way they are leveraged falls short of reflecting the increasingly complex relationship an individual has with a brand. It is simply too one-dimensional and static.

It Wasn’t Always So: Personas Save the Day
In the Web’s infancy as a commerce and marketing channel, speculation and self referential thinking often drove the creation of a Web site’s user experience and the results were poor—causing endless consumer frustration and feature-itis overload. Additionally, the divide between the offline world and the online world was so vast that the use of traditional market segmentation models (based largely on quantitative data analysis and focused on demographics) proved to be inappropriate for devising experiential strategies and truly useful Web site interfaces.

Thanks to the work of author Alan Cooper, the emergence of personas in the 90’s, with their focus on customer goals, behaviors and tasks gleaned from qualitative research, provided a much needed tool to guide the Web site design process. Suddenly, designers had a tool to help model and predict consumer behavior.

That Was Then, This Is Now
It’s been nearly a decade since Cooper introduced personas into the world of software design and development, and the digital universe has expanded exponentially. The most surprising thing that we’ve seen is that the gap between the offline world and online world has shrunk. This phenomenon can be contributed to a number of things:

First, offline consumer segments have been co-opted into online segments by taking into consideration more psychographic information and associating them with using a Web site.

Second, companies have more channels and formats with which to communicate/market to consumers (e.g. email, mobile, video, etc.).

Third, the distinction between interacting with a company’s offline brand vs. its online brand is eroding in many instances—consider the experience of shopping for clothing or electronic goods—making consumers’ movements and experiences between them much more fluid.

Lastly, technologies enable us to more effectively identify, measure and track customers’ online attitudes and behaviors across a brand’s specific channels/formats as well as capture non-brand-related activities (i.e. visiting the competitor’s Web site).

The Way Forward
The emerging breed of personas takes into consideration a broader spectrum of inputs and provides a more comprehensive perspective of peoples’ values, needs, and behaviors all set within a larger world.

Specifically the new personas are derived from a consumer assessment cocktail composed of both quantitative and qualitative data. A combination of research gathering techniques (e.g. online surveys, Web site analytics, interviews, ethnographic observation and ad serving cookies) provides a greater breadth and fidelity of insights about what people say they do, what they actually do, how they do it and why they do it.

The process begins with gathering self reported quantitative insights using online segments as a baseline and leverages those insights to subsequently conduct qualitative research. The two sets of results are rationalized and mapped together to expose any areas of overlap as well as give context to the quantitative self-reporting. Voila! Personas 2.0.

Real Life Example
In an effort to truly understand the story of how people shop for cars “in the real world,” Avenue A | Razorfish employed the approach and techniques described above on behalf of the Ford Motor Company.

What came out of the effort was a rich set of data that comprehensively described the key phases of the car shopping experience and deep insights into offline and online (car shopping) research behaviors, decision making influences and factors, approaches to negotiation and the overall dealer experience.

Furthermore, these insights were packaged into personas that reflect their uniqueness in the context of the shopping experience phases and describe areas of opportunity for providing a satisfying online experience.

Long Live Personas
In an increasingly complex consumer ecosystem, the next generation of personas will be relied on to serve a broader range of needs spanning the offline and online worlds from brand messaging to digital experiences, down to targeted content, features and functionality.

And while the technique is still being honed, the goal is to continue to reference and evolve personas beyond the design phase by associating Web site visitors with a persona and tracking their behavior over time and across the digital universe.

by Vincent Santo