Customer personas

Creating a customer persona through design thinking

“The most effective way to build personas is to interview buyers who have previously weighed their options, considered or rejected solutions, and made a decision similar to the one you want to influence. Unfortunately.” ― Adele Revella

Uncover your market’s essential needs and wants

A customer persona is a condensed version of a market segment. When creating a persona you take into consideration things such as – customer wants and needs, what they consume, platforms they’re on, spaces they occupy, their gender and age, etc – so that you can create a generalised caricature of the market. Personas aren’t based on real people, but on real data collected from a large group of people, used to create a personality that represents them all.

Understand your customer’s traits and behaviour

Personas are created to help simplify decision making in businesses. They act as a quick reference point, on how people think and what they want, for real-world consideration in business conversations. This is a human-centered method, that allows you to analyze behaviour in your customer segments, in order to identify the main traits that define them, so that you can speak to the important needs.

Create solutions that will resonate with your customers

Personas help to bring your target market to life and help you understand your audience better. Through personas, facts and figures of a set target market get a human personality that you can visualise. Creating this personality helps you understand the essence of your market, so that you can implement solutions that will serve them best. This method makes ideation, designing, prototyping, and any other forms of implementation easier, as you can see the “person” you’re designing for.

Things to consider when creating a customer persona

• Research to understand. It is difficult to create a persona from the top of your head. Research your different market segments (qualitative and quantitative), so that you can understand them. The research will help you create personas based on what you know is true about your customers. Through research you can begin to identify the main characteristics of your persona, including things that they’ve actually said.
• Have a primary persona. If you have various segments that seem to be important, and need to be considered when designing, look at having a primary persona and a few secondary persons. Try keep your personas to a maximum of four, as personas are suppose to represent a large portion of your market and their most important needs. Having too many personas will begin to make things complicated, making the use of the personas less effective.
• Never create without a persona. Any design thinking project should include the creating or redefining of customer personas, especially before the get ideas stage begins. Personas inform who you are creating for, and how to speak to them. Having personas will help you improve outputs such as – a customer journey, and prototype.

Glossary
For those sticky, unfamiliar words and phrases.