Personas Introduced - Waiting for Your Cat to Bark Ch14-15
By Craig Danuloff
Most web sites aren’t really designed for anybody. They’re built primarily to present the information the company (or marketing dept.) thinks is important to communicate. To the degree that users are considered at all, they’re all lumped into one mythical average user, who possesses a jumble of approximate desires. At design meeting you hear phrase like: “people are going to want…” and “we should give them…”.
:: Note: This post is part of a chapter-by-chapter review and commentary on Waiting for Your Cat to Bark, by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg with Lisa Davis. Read the original review or catch up on the last 13 chapter reviews ::
The other extreme is the idea of personalization, where a web site conforms to the individual needs of each user, as expressed in both past behaviors and explicit choices. The problem of course is that personalization is easy with things like online banking and nearly impossible in most other areas; take online travel reservations as one example. My travel habits could be very different between business and personal travel; the urgency of the trip might change my willingness to fly my not-favorite-airline; and the start-time for my morning meeting might decide how important a four-star-hotel is vis-à-vis the hotel’s location.
Plus, how many questions would I have to answer to provide a really complete picture of my travel preferences? And how granular would the sites data categorization have to be to really adjust for every possible personalization combination? The answer to both is “too many”.
Chapters 14 and 15 of Waiting for Your Cat to Bark introduce us to “Personas” as they are used in Persuasion Architecture. Personas are the alternative to the over-generalization of averages, and the impossibility of personalization. The book defines them in Chapter 14 as:“an archetype, a representative of a typical segment of your audience…. Each (sic) represents the different modes customers exhibit when they interact with you… Personas are standing for the various angles from which your customers view their problems and your solutions…Personas give you an in-depth, personal glimpse at your customers and their personal preferences without having to ask every customer to divulge that in-depth personal information.
Personas enable you to segment your audience, usually into a very manageable number of groups and yet still provide those groups with a vastly better experience than if you’d have averaged them all together with a fraction of the effort (and undoubtedly a lot more success) then if you’d gone for the utopian dream of full personalization.
In Chapter 15 we get a lot more detail about personas and the ways that PA defines and uses them somewhat differently than other design and development methods. The distinction lies in the use of personas not just as demographic representations, but also to ‘stand in for buying modalities’ and cover the ‘angles of approach’ of users to content.
What does that mean? Consider the travel examples above: A demographic-only persona wouldn’t account for the differences between a quick business trip and a lengthy personal vacation. People act differently depending on the situation, their goals, how far they are along a process, and other factors. These factors have to be accounted for because they change user needs and reactions.
Remember that personas are ‘typicals, not averages’. Typical visitors are complex and multidimensional, and their activities are impacted by who they are, what they’re doing, their past experiences, and more. By adding these layers to our personas we increase their power and precision – at least in terms of how we interact with the people in the groups these personas represent.
Fleshing out personas in this way naturally narrows the range of visitors to which they apply. Are we risking being too specific and thereby leaving too many visitors behind? I think the Eisenbergs would argue that if you don’t get specific, you’re leaving everyone behind.
In practice, creating these rich and ‘real world’ personas is a very engaging process and almost instantly resets the way everyone involved starts thinking about the content of the website. Just about everyone knows someone fitting each of the defined persona types, and personal anecdotes help prove these personas do indeed well describe real people.
With these people in mind, we’re able to have ‘empathy within the business for the persona’s wants, desires, needs, and problems’ as the book describes. At that point you can begin to build detailed scenarios for interacting with them. And it’s these scenarios that we’ll actually model in the process of using Persuasion Architecture to redesign a website.
Several upcoming chapters will dive deeper into personas and their psychographics, modalities, and angles. This gives us time to allow the idea of ‘typicals not averages’ to sink in and begin changing the way we think about our online communications.
