What is a Persona?
It is crucial for small and medium businesses to find useful and low cost tools in order to improve internal and external operations. Taking advantage of all the low cost efficient tools available will allow a firm to gain a competitive advantage in the market and sharpen their processes with no loss of revenue.
A useful tool that all small and medium businesses should take advantage of is the development of user personas. It is impossible to differentiate and recognize everyone who engages with your brand, but it is very important to understand all your customers. In order to achieve a full understanding of your customers, the development of a persona can aid in understanding user behaviour, purchasing decisions, and lifestyle choices while not knowing each person.
A persona is a fictional representation of an actual user that represents a group of people and is utilized in the early stages of developing a product or redesigning a product. Personas are a vital tool and contribute to the success of a product, as they are the driving force behind design decisions. By taking the common user needs, a persona has the ability to plan prior to the development of the design.
The article “What is Persona Development and Why is it Important” posted by Segue Technologies makes many good points as to why persona development should be apart of every businesses tool kit. To summarize the reasons: personas are beneficial as they improve teamwork, website and application creation, and eliminate personal opinions.
Ways a Small/Medium Sized Business Can Use a Persona
Improve Teamwork
Personas create a consistent understanding of the target user group between team members, allowing everyone to be on the same page of understanding towards the targeted audience. This helps to avoid any misinterpretations or differences in understandings of the user. Personas take data and create compelling stories that are relatable, making them easy for a team to remember and refer to when working towards a solution. Personas help improve teamwork within the internal environment of the business.
Website and Application Creation
Personas contribute in the creation of site architecture and wireframes. Personas are designed to focus on the needs of the user group. A team can generate and test scenarios in order to determine the ideal placement of content on a platform so that it supports the goal of the product and usability for the user. The firm will now has a full understanding of the user and their wants when visiting and navigating a platform. The use of personas in planning the platform’s architecture and wireframes will save your firm money and time that could potentially be used on the redesigning of a product. Using a persona will prevent the need for re-launching a website or product, and having to call it back from the market to redesign or adjust the product or site in any way.
Eliminate Personal Opinions
Personas create a user story and attach a face to that story. This helps in creating an understanding about the user that would utilize the product and developing more empathy and a deeper understanding of that person. Attaching a face to the product allows designers to prevent the urge of applying their own needs or mental models to the design of the product that may deviate from the users wants and not align with the product design for the users needs.
Visit: https://www.seguetech.com/persona-development-important/ to read the full article.
Building a User Persona
A persona encompasses user behaviours, motivations, and lifestyle choices that a cluster of users share and exhibit similar patterns in. A persona is used to best understand your entire user experience and to aid in the development of a product and decisions in the development process by taking into account the users traits, needs, and tendencies. However in order to create a strong user persona, it is important to understand the psychographic motivators and demographics of your customers.
There are two components involved in understanding customers, these are the demographics and psychographics. Demographics contain the physical facts including context and income of the user’s outer world. These include the user’s culture, class, age, gender, etc.
Psychographics pertain to developing a deeper understanding of the user’s inner world including their motives, fears, desires, etc. An understanding of the reasoning of their attitudes and behaviours emerges here.
It is important to understand the demographics and psychographics of the user group while developing a persona in order to predict attitudes, behaviours, preferences, and incorporate these inclinations in the design and development of the product or platform.
Demographics and psychographics are the driving forces behind why people make certain decisions, act a certain way, or prefer a certain product. To succeed in a business it is required to understand how people think, human psychology is primarily exercised in marketing and product design. Developing a persona and gaining a deeper understanding of these two components will allow you as a firm to place yourself in the position of your potential customers and be able to develop according to their needs. This will allow you to excel in your design abilities and minimize mistakes.
As a business leader for a small/medium sized firm, it is important to rethink your strategies and tactics if you are not taking advantage of this free and very useful tool.
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