The Better Business Analysis Institute Presence.
The Better Business Analysis Podcast with Kenjan Walsh Hi
everybody and welcome back to the Better Business Analysis
Podcast with Benjamin Walsh. And today we are going to talk
about why business analysts should use personas.
Personas are such an important element in business analysis
when you've truly got the time to understand the customer's
needs, your target customer, we'll talk about that in a
minute. And when you're truly value
whether or not whatever change you are performing or whatever
project you're carrying out or product you're releasing is
actually going to make a difference.
So personas are actually help join a little bit of the reality
of your customer base into some kind of fictional characters.
So if you don't know what a persona is, I'll start with what
a persona is and why you would like to use them or why you
should be using them. So persona really is a detailed
semi fictional so it does have facts associated with it.
It is a representation of a segment of the market and
marketing personas are used heavily for marketing and in the
world of business analysis, we leverage that concept.
We do things slightly different to marketers, but it's
ultimately has the same outcome. Marketers are wanting to sell
more basically people engaging with products and using the
product and it's ultimately what we want to achieve.
So personas are semi fictional representations of the target
audience for the product. Your target audience is really
everyone OK and marketers can get quite hung up on that,
especially if you have a large audience, you're going after
some mass market. I worked at a government
department which was releasing a strategy and a set of tools for
a large segment. And marketers really struggled
with that to a point where they didn't believe or struggled with
the amount of personas we had. But we simply were just looking
at a large customer base, which was pretty much a lot of people
in New Zealand. And the only response that I
could really come up with at the time, and I still think it's
relevant is they were our own personas.
However, some of them were a priority list.
We're more of our target customer right now, OK?
And our and our project should have really focused on those
sets of personas. To start off with.
Personas encapsulate specific customer segment
characteristics. If you don't know what a
customer segment is, it is you. Your customers are made of
segments like a pie, like a cake, you chop it up, that's who
you're targeting. It's that type of cake which has
different customers in it and there's different segments
percentages. The percentage make up of your
customer base can be represented by the customer segment and a
persona. They these segments have
characteristics, needs, motivations and behaviours.
So these are really important. The need, what do they want,
what are the goals, what is the job that they want to complete?
It's a job to be done, is another word of saying that what
are their motivations are usually caused by pain.
So pain points or problem statements, and what are the
behaviours, how do they act? And so needs, motivations and
behaviours are very much core to our custom segments.
Sometimes characteristics around our persona become overwhelming.
People start going well, you know, they're between the ages
of 18 and 24. They're most likely to be
European descent. They might have blonde hair.
You know, like you get to a point where the characteristics
are just too too much. And actually you're moving away
from grouping your customers into needs, motivations and
behaviors which are more important than some of the
demographic information I just read out earlier.
Demographics can make a difference, especially location
or those demographics influence behavior because of tradition or
where people live or you know, studies on, you know, if you're
male or female, for example, or just take those two genders.
There might be certain behaviors that you know if you're a
generalized behaviors that a male might make over a female,
for example. So characteristics only help
make generalizations, but really they inform.
If they don't inform needs, motivations or behaviors, then
they're not that important. OK, an example where you're
selling to pregnant woman or woman who are either just had a
baby or are currently pregnant, then those characteristics will
will be important as a broad statement.
And then within those that set, you could divide your segments
into different needs, motivations, behaviors.
So those who are really wanting to prep for the expecting baby
to those who are worried about health concerns.
So motivation might be more nurturing, one might be just
more preparation and factual. So there there are those kind of
motivation needs and behaviors are more important that and
obviously you've already identified that your greatest
segment is your target customer is is pregnant woman or woman
with very young children. So why why personas useful
persona as a business analyst, I guess using personas helps
understand, helps make real who our stakeholders are.
OK, So it's understanding our our key stakeholders.
Now in a corporation or a large organization, you can start you
may you you can use personas. There's no reason why you can't
for internal and external staff. I've recently just done a piece
of work where I did a workshop yesterday actually, where we
were designing the different audiences of information and
some of those personas were both internal and they were external
and they all just have different needs and motivation.
So that is OK. There's no problem with that.
It makes it kind of. I guess the only caveat I'd say
there is that you why are you doing the personas in the 1st
place? If your target audience is
external customers, you should be doing it.
You should be focusing on external customers if you want.
If you happen to have internal customers, then that's OK too.
But you're not just doing it for anyone who's involved in the
project. I just want to make that clear.
It's not one to one with stakeholder management within a
project. Personas go beyond the
demographics as we talked about providing those goals, pain
points, and preferences which align with needs, motivation,
and behaviors. Right, They're all preferences.
Behaviors are interlinked. Pain points and motivations,
Goals and needs. We're creating vivid characters
here. OK, so and it will enforces us,
actually enforces us using this technique and enforces us to
gain a deeper understanding of who we're actually targeting.
And I have said that when I have applied personas to projects,
don't do it all the time. And you know it's not something
that I I do religiously. But in a situation, especially
when I'm targeting an external customer, it's very, very
important. And by by by defining these,
it's not a tick box exercise. It's not just a fun cultural
exercise. And you do get, you do get value
from having, you know, pictures of your customer on the I think
that's really important in itself, just having an idea of
who your customer is. If you work for a Ministry of
Education, education ministry, having representations of the
different types of segments or school kids that are out there
knowing about them, talking about them through a persona,
not, you know, real representations, representations
of necessary individuals but they could represent a
population. But generally these are they're
they're anonymized. So they're they're not using
actual people but they're representations of it might be
really useful to be reminded that you know that's the that's
the person that I'm trying to help here on a daily basis
regardless of the change that you don't just a motivation that
I'm working for this organization, working for a
government department generally being paid less and these are
all the type of people that are trying to help.
And my work, even though I might work on the service desk, that's
I'm here to support little Tammy who is a disadvantaged child
who's going to school in the regions, possibly, right.
Cool. So it's really around providing
A deeper understanding of who we're targeting.
That's the purpose of personas. But they can also help us with
prioritization where we invest effort and ultimately guiding
our decisions it. It actually helps us make more
informed decision because it allows us to put out what we,
what we might say is to put ourselves in the customer's
shoes. It allows us to step into the
shoes and say, what would a customer want here?
Not what we want. What would be easier for us?
What do we think is the best solution?
But actually what is best for that customer?
OK, we understand their needs, their desires and aspirations
and challenges, and we get to make informed decisions based on
those insights. OK, deep insights into customer
behaviour patterns. And you do get into psychology
here. You start to actually go, well,
what would change that person's behaviour?
If that's who we're targeting and that's who we want to use
our product, for example, What is it about their behaviour that
we need to know about and how will that change what our
product does or how we market it.
So we are talking about tailing our product.
If it is a product or a service to make sure that it's tailored
the content, marketers use it to tailor content specifically to
move a behavior. They're experts in that customer
support. I guess we can work out, is this
customer going to benefit from from from this change we're
making. It allows us to measure whether
or not our solutions are going to resonate with our audience.
On a personal level, if we've got our personas right, we'll
talk about how to get our personas right soon.
And in terms of the general idea about thinking about your
customers, it changes us to a customer centric model.
OK, instantly. Sometimes people will
interchange the word user to customer.
I prefer customer centric here. Users usually associated with
internal stuff. Personas by themselves foster
empathy. And if you're a great BA or
you're a designer, especially if you're a human centered
designer, then you'll know all about personas and you will know
all about empathy and empathy mapping.
And to be honest, most of the great Basi know have a high
level of empathy for the world. It allows you to to understand
your customers deeply and you design solutions you actually go
into bat for them sometimes, like on the in the boardroom.
That and you're you're influencing solutions or
products or even the direction of the company to truly meet the
needs of your customer, which is win.
Win. Because ultimately, if your
customers are happy, they'll buy more.
But it's hard to get that across sometimes, mark marketers will
use personas to target their marketing strategy.
So it's useful if you've done it.
Not that I've done it at the end of the line, after your
product's developed their messaging features, interactions
align with what's valuable to your personas.
So that's really important too. So really, we should be defining
these before it gets to your marketing team.
Or you could utilize marketing resources to help you define
these upfront and for them. They may know about your
existing customer base quite well and they might have a lot
of information. We can use personas to
prioritize features or I guess user stories and the apex that
we want to focus on. That's it.
Allows us to focus on what made us most to our target audience.
In an agile situation where you're releasing a product, that
might be the that might be your driver.
So the product owner should be looking at what's most important
to your target audience all the time, and may only be making
decisions around other requirements or user stories
that will be done because they logically need to fit in order
to enable the customer to complete their job the customer
hasn't explicitly asked for. It allows us also to avoid
assumptions. Personas prevent, I guess
predicting individual biased on solutions.
That happens way more than you may guess.
It happens all the time, either at the management level or the
architecture level, even in the BA level.
Sometimes we are basing our decisions and we need this to to
drive true personas based on real insights, not just
assumptions. And obviously doing all this
stuff helps facilitate common understanding, improved
communication across stakeholders.
When we can say, hey, look, is Little Tammy going to benefit
from this or we're not talking about it.
No, we're actively not focusing on Little Tammy for the Sprint
or the first product release. OK, cool.
Well, I'll stop thinking about that.
That really focuses we're focusing on on Jane and Ann and
those types of customers in this release.
I can see why we're doing what we're doing.
Everyone is speaking the same language.
You're breaking down silos across teams using personas,
which is fantastic. And because you can use personas
for different people outside of your even your development team,
marketing, development, support teams, they all have a unified
perspective on what you are focusing on and who you are
targeting. This should personas should
guide product design. It does.
Good product managers do this, BAS, not so much human centered
design designers do it quite a lot and sometimes do too much of
it, which we'll talk about soon. It's not all about your
personas, but ultimately we're there to try and create products
that add value. And this will allow us to focus
our attention on our target customers, representations of
them, measure success and reduce the risk of building stuff that
just misses the mark. OK.
So we're going to run through some examples now of what a
persona is and an example and we are then going to talk about a
template that you can use when you write your user stories.
We talk this talk about this often at the bit of Business
Analysis Institute. It's actually a template that we
use. So I'm going to give you, you
know, a secret if you haven't done our course yet, when we
write our user stories, instead of having as a user or as an
actor, you just replace the Aza and they are your personas.
OK, so straight away you've got a place to use personas, You've
worked out who your customers are and your personas align with
the Aza. OK, yes, you might have internal
customers. They can be represented by
personas. You might have your company
itself as AI. Don't know Fit Inc Limited.
If that's your fitness company you run, then that could be you
as a company, you could say as Fitness or Fit Limited Inc
Limited. I want to blah blah blah.
So that's your persona in there. And if you have some personas
that you've identified as part of your customer segments, which
we'll talk about examples in a minute, then you would use, you
would fit that into your story. And of course, epics are stories
as well. So your epics could will be
represented by one of those personas that you're talking
about. That's where you use them.
OK, so now you know where you use them.
And of course, if you have now inserted them there, then you've
you've got a practical way of prioritizing each user story
based on that persona's requirements.
So if your target customer is someone who I don't know once
like I said maybe as a a new mother they've just had a baby
that should that should take a customer.
The mothers, you mothers have just had babies and you've
worked out that your target customer is someone who is
middle class, so has pretty good income, disposable income.
Someone who is buying for their baby, who's happy to spend money
on both the safety of their child but also wants them to
wear the finest things, let's say, OK, so that's your persona,
so that basically let's call them the, let's call them Jane
the overbuyer, potentially say that they are more than average,
they're over the normal distribution curve in terms of
providing for their new baby. They're going to go above and
beyond and by all the great stuff, OK?
And wants them to look good at the same time.
They may be, you know, in their early 30s and they just have the
income to be able to to support that outcome.
That's their motivation. They want people to see that
their babies are looked after. They want to have all the they
want the best for their child. They can afford to do that.
They want other people to see that they've invested in that
experience for their child and you know maybe they're in some
fashion and so they want their child to look good even as a
baby to to be stylish as they are themselves.
So that's quite a I've just given you a a brief rundown on
this particular persona and if one of the must have
requirements for a new product for our new store maybe that is
catering for this target segment, it would, it would you
would have a must have requirement in there surely
around premium products. OK.
This persona if that's our target customer we'll work that
out with our lean canvas for example, that's who our main
target customer is. We wouldn't have a must
requirement around stocking low value or low cost goods that you
could get at say Kmart or what's the equivalent in America,
Walmart for example, that customer, they their
motivations, their beliefs and their desires and goals is to
buy premium products And so those they wouldn't, they
wouldn't be looking at, you wouldn't be looking at stocking
products, you could get at some of those cheapest stores.
So that gives you an idea of the thought process there and how
you'd prioritize the job to be done and.
How you it would influence your business model and what you what
you even buy in stock. It also can help with
estimating. I guess when we talk about the
persona in in regards to user stories and epics, it might help
help estimate the effort and cost that it takes to meet the
needs of that particular customer for those priority
groups. And also the sequence in which
you tackle the particular user story.
What is the highest value items for your personas, not just
highest value items. OK, So what we're going to talk
about is some personas, some example personas here that
relate to a company, it's that's cool.
We're working for this Fitness Inc and we want to create a
product called Fit Pal, OK. It's a it's an app, it's an app,
we're going to, it's a fitness based app.
I think this is a good example, and I'm going to give you an
example of three different personas here, which we can use
to think about and to demonstrate the use of personas.
So let's say that we have looked at our target customers and
we've identified in our target customer area, there are three
distinct segments who we want to target, and they're represented
by active Annie, busy Brian and Newbie Natalie.
I'm going to give you a rundown of those 3 personas in Active
Annie. I'm just going to give you
background goals and pain points here, OK?
The background, the goal and the pain point that they are that
Annie has. And of course you can expand
this out to some motivations and pain points.
Motivations are always good. But we'll we'll look at Active
Annie. So let's say the background for
Active Annie is she's 30 years old.
Her occupation is a PhD student. She lives in LA, in America,
California, and her fitness level is that she is an
enthusiastic runner and weightlifter.
OK, so think about those background attributes.
Don't they all give you an idea about who Active Annie is?
OK, fit When you're thinking about this Fit PAL app that
we're going to design this personal fitness app.
And we've decided we've done our background, we've done our Lane
canvas Active, Annie, really you can start to think about any
Robinson, this PhD student, you know, obviously obviously smart,
starting to be a doctor, which means income later living in LA,
which is very body conscious, Location, you know where
Hollywood's AT and the fitness level is really enthusiastic.
We are running and weightlifting.
Can't you imagine in your head if you close your eyes and
listen to that, listen to that description, Can't you imagine
who active any is? Can't you visualize active any
what you might look like now? Obviously your own backgrounds
and experiences and environment will influence what active any
looks like. And it doesn't matter what kind
of I guess I would say you know cultural connotations you have.
Whether or not active any is African American or someone
who's just you know a recent immigrant from Afghanistan or as
Asian descent or born in the US or whatever it does that does,
that's not important. But we can all imagine our
version of act of any in our head.
OK. And obviously if you had a image
that was associated with act of any, which is a good idea and
and you know you can use AI to generate these images now as
well you could you could target that specifically around the
environment that you live in, your target customer if that
really mattered. But I don't think some of those
demographics make much of a difference.
We know who active AI is and I head straight away now.
Now active AI has goals, motivations and pain points.
And these goals, motivations and pain points a specific active
Annie. And we'll see.
This is a template we can use. So the active Annie, what do you
think her goals would be? So one of the goals for active
Annie is that she would like to track her work out effectively.
OK, and matters. She's enthusiastic runner and
weightlifter, which means that she's really into that, which
means that it makes a difference if she's running two KS or three
KS or four KS or five KS. So she really wants to.
She's really goal motivated. So she wants to track her
workouts effectively. Maybe she wants to monitor her
calorie intake and maybe she wants personalized exercise
routines that are going to make the best use of her time
training and and what she eats. So they're the goals, they are
goals that we can assume. But we should test those goals.
And most importantly, we should have interviewed people in our
active group that represent any who are enthusiastic runners and
weight lifters and in the LA area around this age.
And we should have looked at their goals and interviewed them
and then worked out what are the common goals across that
segment. And let's say we've done that
and these are the goals for that area.
We asked them what their motivations are.
So her motivations, and this makes it a little bit real, is
high quality, strong coffee. OK, so one of the one of the
motivations, she loves great coffee.
She wants a quiet atmosphere for studying.
That's really important. One of the other motivations is
convenient. Located near college campus,
it's something she's looking for in terms of this fitness Apple
area. So they're not specific around
necessarily like a a gym or an app or looking at a solution,
right? This is just the motivations
that active Annie has. And then in terms of the pain
points, she dislikes waiting too long for coffee.
Don't we all? I I I can sympathize with Annie,
but I'm maybe not the most enthusiastic runner out there at
these days. She prefers not to be bothered
by staff when studying, doesn't want to be bothered at all, and
relies on strong coffee for concentration.
So that gives you a little bit of an idea of more now behaviour
or psychology around any. So that's that's important.
And we could actually design some features or some
requirements that relate to Annie.
So this would happen later after we've gone through all the
personas. But let's think about some of
the key features or stories or yes, I guess they are features,
they're they're solutions, they're conceptual solutions in
which Annie would like. So one of it might be workout
training with progress towards goals like graphs she wants.
She's already said that she wants personalized exercise for
herself. So she may be personalized
exercise routines or something that resonates with Annie.
And we already know because of the coffee situation in which
she told us she will be inclined to want quick and professional
service order online, avoiding lining up.
OK, so that's Annie. I think we've got Annie, then
we've got busy Brian. OK.
So I'm going to walk through Brian and then Natalie a little
bit faster, but you get the idea.
Brian Mitchell 40, OK, I want you to close your eyes and think
about this. Brian Mitchell 40.
He's a working professional, probably see a suit and a tie,
his limited time for workouts and he also lives in LA,
California. The goals for Brian or busy
Brian? Brian Mitchell is he wants fit,
quick workouts and a busy schedule.
He wants to seamlessly integrate his fitness routine with work
and family life. We already know Brian has a
family now and work. The motivations for Brian is he
wants efficiency and time saving solutions.
He's time poor, hashtag, time poor.
Put a hashtag on that. He wants to stay active despite
A hectic schedule. So with all that's going on with
family and work, and he's 40 years old, he still wants to
maintain his fitness at the 40, which is a critical time in a
man's life. As I'm finding out with pain
points, he needs to balance working with family and fitness.
OK? They are three circles that
Brian needs to to manage in his life.
He needs workouts that do not disrupt his day.
He's he's on A roll with business, juggling business and
family already, and with family and work and fitness.
He needs to fit in around that day.
OK, so that should give you an idea around what Brian is, OK?
And we can all imagine what Brian looks like, slightly
receding hairline. Maybe he got a tan because he
wants to look good and he's working out.
He goes for runs, but he's busy and maybe he's a lawyer and he
works at La and fitness is important to him.
Family's too important to him. So he's not someone who's
hanging around at the clubs and he doesn't have much time and
he's really efficient and he and he schedules everything in his
life. We all know what Brian's like.
So some of the key features that Brian has literally told you,
some of the solutions in which Brian has told you his
requirements, and some solutions or features you're looking at.
The join between both the user story and the solution is which
we call features quick workouts, 15 to 10 minutes reminders for
consistency and time effective exercises.
Right. We're going to move on to newbie
Natalie here. So Natalie Adams, 25, beginner
in fitness, also lives in LA California and she has just
started her fitness journey. OK, so beginner to fitness 25
newbie. The goals is that she wants to
start fitness. She wants to learn properly and
proper form and techniques. She wants to understand
nutritional basics. She wants to gradually improve
her professional level. Her motivations is she's eager
to explore the fitness world and seek a guidance in education,
and wants to do it right. Her pain point is that she feels
overwhelmed by all the information she gets from germs
and places, and she needs beginner friendly content.
So the key features for Natalie would be tutorials and
educational content, gradual challenges that lead up and
clear information. So with this Fit Pal app in
which we've identified these three kind of target customers,
you would focus on your, the customer that's your early
adopter, which one of these customers or personas
effectively are your early adopters.
You would do that in your Lync canvas and in this app, in this
kind of Fit Pal app. There's a premise in the lean
canvas that we haven't talked about, which is that we think
that we got to create an app that focuses on nutrition,
exercise and also having a fitness, fitness pal where you
meet this person over coffee and you pee your workouts and you
make friends. So it's kind of a social,
social, self exercising and nutritional app.
In this example here, we've got our three customer personas that
we talked about. There might be more and we might
say that the person that we're focusing on 1st is Natalie.
So we might say that active Annie is someone that we
ultimately want to target next. They're the kind of mass market
workout people that we want to make this app targeted at.
And that's our kind of mass market.
And maybe some of the late adopters might be people like
Bruce who are time poor and they might want to use the app
feature but not the social meeting and learning feature.
And then naturally might be our early adopter.
Naturally he's actively wanting to learn about fitness, so he
wants to try something new. Maybe we do a bit of work out
some insights around technology use and whether or not, you
know, there's this another persona around that we can split
out from nationally to those who use technology on the go all the
time and those that don't and target on the ones that do use
technology. And I'm motivated to learn about
fitness, but they can do it in a fun way by having a fitness pal
drinking a cup of coffee and then learning from our maybe our
trainers who we send out. So that's an idea about how you
would use Pessonas and there were there were kind of three
examples in this in this example at Fit Pal.
Now that should give you an idea about the use and then how they
can be applied down at the user story level.
And also like I just said, we've just made a decision there as a
team that naturally would be our first target customer.
So maybe the features that relate to Natalie's particular
pain points and those epics are the personas, sorry, are the
user stories that we should be focusing on 1st.
So we've made a decision just using real people.
Well, real examples of people what the other thing that's
really important when you are looking at personas is both to
make sure that these personas are quantifiable too.
So we want to know what percentage of the market we want
to have some really numbers, how many Nationalies are there in
LA, right, if that's where we're going to launch, how many young
people who are starting their finished, finished journey are
there in LA. So give us some real numbers
around that to make sure it's viable.
And then we want to measure that same we want to market, sorry to
Natalie, we want to market to the Natalies, the 25 year old
female who want to get into fitness, want to get want to use
some of the features We've just, she's just described as being
pain point areas for her and we want to market spend money on
that. And we also want to measure how
many of those Natalies are clicking on our landing page or
our app page. You know, how many are
responding to the ads, how many are clicking through.
Oh, actually it's really interesting.
We were doing this marketing campaign with these features
that we thought we would do first to target this target
segment and we've actually found that a whole lot of what we
would describe as active annies are actually clicking on it.
So we can get that through Facebook.
We can get that through, you know, Instagram, which Facebook
owns Tiktok, LinkedIn, potentially.
And it will give us demographics and it will tell us and we'll
go, oh man, there's actually people that are a little bit
older, a little bit wealthier, a little bit more active into
fitness that interests fitness already.
They're already actively describing, checked in to gyms.
Wow, They're actually responding to this ad.
So we can that's when we go, OK, well, it's really interesting.
They're picking up on it. And so we're now kind of can
really link the data to these real people we talked about,
right. And and we can know whether or
not we're not hitting the mark, we are hitting the mark.
And it all is all about learning.
It is all about getting that information, getting the data in
to kind of measure whether or not our target segments are
actually and our personas are real.
And if we need to evolve them, we can.
If you do evolve your personas, then obviously your target
customers may be changing and you need to decide whether or
not you're pivoting from your original idea.
And if you know anything about link canvases or have listened
to those podcasts, you'll know what I'm talking about there.
Now, when you effectively want to put these personas together,
this let's let's just list off like 10 steps, really just 10
steps to create these insightful personas.
So #1 is to do the research, right?
Is to gather information about your customers through
interviews and surveys and means you're validating your
hypothesis with real data to make sure they are your target
customers based on the solution and the problems that you are
solving. If you have been involved in
start-ups, problems is what you measure, not your solution.
And the reason why you might. The reason that it's problematic
to focus on solutions is that you we're notoriously bad at
doing customer computer analysis and just because you have a
great idea, there could be hundreds of other people with
viable, what we call viable alternatives that you haven't
thought about. OK?
And you don't sometimes don't really understand how people
customers are meeting their needs or solving a pain point
that you think is a pain point. So it's all around, let's say
we'll just make the assumption that our pain point is valid and
there and our solution is going to could be more popular and
easier to use and solves the problems cheaper, faster, more
efficiently than other solutions.
Let's say that's true, then you also need.
You need data for that. But you also need data to
validate who is responding to you, to your solution and to the
pain points you've solved by your.
Solution #2 is we segment our audience groups based on common
common characteristics. Like I said though, it's more
about behaviour than it is around demographics.
OK, it's about behaviours and goals.
It is still useful to have demographics so we can visualise
the people they're useful for Targeting advertising so that
demographics are literally used in Google ads or Facebook ads.
And the behaviour side is out of the next level of marketing
where we literally have data on behaviours now.
And so it can provide us with deeper insights into improving
our customer experience or you know, changing the features and
seeing how people, how a product actually performs in the market.
And you can do that without building a real product.
Just just a side note there, you could just have a landing page.
It's called, it's I guess it's an MVPA.
True MVP where you aren't even building anything, you're just.
Literally seeing whether or not our customers are responding to
this app you're going to launch and if they're clicking on or
interested in the features that you have on your website #3 you
need to decide the layout for your persona.
You generally draw these up, I would say a simple PowerPoint
presentation, Google slide, physical piece of paper where
you have a a picture of the person.
You can use AI to generate their or a sketch, and you have some
demographics underneath the picture on the left hand side.
And then you have sections like Background, goals, motivations
and pain points, OK. And you might later add in the
features underneath those personas.
They're not. They're a response to the
persona around what you think will, what features or areas or
requirements you think are associated with those, those
personas. And you can do that later.
If this is a or do this physically, I'd put it on a
board somewhere in a project team or for your for your group
or team where you sit. Those demographics really need
to be based on real data. So you could say how many people
of this age, you know, gender, occupation, location, how many,
what's the data around that? What?
What represents that person who's got their motivation?
So you can also do that through keyword analysis.
Say how many people are searching for fitness with
friends? And Google will literally tell
you, give you a graph and tell you the percentage of people,
their age, demographic. As you've set up Google
Analytics, you can look into that.
You're using that information and you should have percentages
here. You can use this information to
create relatable personas, so they're real.
You want to describe the person's background, Like I
said, maybe even a back story. What got them there?
Give them a little bit more flavor, like a bit of a book.
We didn't do that earlier, but it also helps.
You could say, well, you know, Natalie's just recently moved to
LA Maybe she moved from mainland China where she was working and
she came off her parents farm. So exercise was built into the
farming life. But now she wants to experience
a real exercise. She's got a job in finance.
You know, you can give a, a really interesting back story to
to Natalie here who's getting new.
It might explain why she's only getting into fitness now that
she's 25 maybe, or what triggered that motivation?
So you can be rich with this stuff, right.
And. And and people might say, well,
that hasn't happened to all the people that are within that
segment or that persona. And that's OK, though you're
trying to make these people real and relatable and they need they
need reals and relatable could be two different things.
Real data could show quite different picture or make up to
what you've described naturally as so use the data to drive it.
When you define their goals, you want to do their jobs to be done
goals. What does your persona aim to
achieve? What are their objectives?
What are the desired outcomes? What do they want?
What where do they want to go? You may be helping them all
along. The journey you may define their
is really important here is that personas go hand in hand with
customer journeys. So you should map out the steps
in which naturally carries out today to go and look out of
fitness. If her goal is to learn more
about fitness and start a fitness routine, maybe ask what
steps she's carrying out now to learn about those things.
Or even you know, the experience she's had before to go to a
German, do something. Do you understand her customer
journey that she's going through and the desired customer journey
when she uses your app? That's where you're linked to
processes, and that's how your user story should really drop
out of the steps and the customer journey.
Then, after you've done the goals and the desires, #7 is you
want to define the motivations and frustrations.
What is driving your persona? Why the why?
What motivates them to take action?
What will motivate them to take action?
Ultimately, you want your customers to take action.
If they don't take action, they won't use your product.
You need to figure out what is going to motivate them to take
action, what will motivate them. And if that price of that price
not in in in indirect monetary terms is too high, they may not
be the right customers to target straight away.
They may be late. Late adopters, not really
adopters. OK, you need to recognize their
pain points and frustrations, and your product needs to solve
those. It doesn't matter that it's got
all the whiz bang, other features.
If it doesn't solve the pain points, they won't use it.
And if it doesn't solve those pain points better, cheaper,
faster than the competitors, they won't use it though.
They'll start, they'll download it, they'll use it once, and
they'll sign out. OK, that happens all the time.
People are using for new features.
If it's an app, they'll down three, they'll download 3 copies
of a similar app, they'll use them, they'll find the one with
the best UX, the one with the best features, the cheapest
option, and they'll use that. And then you can get false data
where you think someone's downloaded my app, that's a win.
But if they're not using it, they don't continue to use it.
They don't load money on it, they don't go past the free
trial. You can get false data.
And this happens so often, There's a massive company in New
Zealand called the Warehouse Group.
They, they run a kind of like a, it's literally a physical
warehouse for a shop. So a little bit like Walmart and
you go in there and they own these and then they went and
they acquired lots of other stores.
They acquired kind of an outdoor retailer called Torpedo 7:00.
They have a mobile arm. They do lots of other things.
It's hugely successful, but they've had a lot of bad
business decisions where they've people are shopping more online.
They know that Amazon might be moving to New Zealand soon, so
they're wanting to respond to that.
They set up an online marketplace called the Market in
New Zealand where other suppliers could use their
warehousing. They could sell their goods
online through this one marketplace.
And look, it sounds fantastic. I used it quite a lot.
There's no reason why the market couldn't dominate the market.
The New Zealand market in terms of online retail like Amazon has
had in the US because Amazon wasn't, isn't here yet.
Really it's in Australia, it's in the States and UK but we we
have to that cost a lot of money to ship here And so it's not
actually doesn't make it generally viable to do that.
And the same way Trade Me in New Zealand has pretty much got all
the online kind of auctions or used goods market in New
Zealand. eBay just doesn't exist in New Zealand.
It just isn't something that runs here because Trade Me
dominates the market. Peter Teal, the we'll talk about
domination in his book. Now if you who happens to come
and live in New Zealand sometimes with the market and
the Warehouse group, they should have dominated that market.
It seemed like they were dominating.
But then on recent times I started to search for goods that
I wanted to buy and none of their results were coming up in
Google ads or in the product listing under shopping shipping
tab. So I was like very surprised
that that wasn't the case. And what I found checking prices
sometimes is it was cheaper to buy it from the retailer who was
advertising on the market than it was to buy through the market
because of their shipping and their logistics cause kind of
cost. It was standardized and so it
was actually sometimes cheaper to buy it directly.
So you'd go on the market, find the product you wanted, use the
great search and then go buy it somewhere else direct actually
with the retailer or you know, wholesaler who was selling it.
So that seemed a flaw in their plan.
I noticed that kind of early on. And the other thing about the
market is that when they launched, they gave away a lot
of coupons. So they said, you know, if you
spend $50, we'll give you $10 back.
So a lot of people were saving these coupons and we're using
these coupons and saving money and we're going on there.
And there were massive amounts of coupons when you first signed
up to the website and there was a lot of free shipping deals.
And then they added a premium plan, a bit like Amazon Prime,
where, you know, you could pay a monthly fee and then you
wouldn't have to pay for shipping.
You could buy as much as you liked.
So all those kind of tricks of the trade that all those online
retailers now do, and if you hadn't thought too much about
it, it looked like things were going well.
Well, I just read the news the other day and obviously they
hadn't done enough work on their personas, their business model
or their cost model. So what happened was I think
they had a false sense that they were doing really well and
they've lost millions, hundreds of millions of dollars.
And now that part of their business is up for sale, another
bad decision. And I would say that they
obviously didn't do their persona work.
They obviously didn't look at the behaviours and the pain
points they were trying to solve and they weren't getting data on
these, on these pain points and what they were doing.
And this is, I guess the lesson I'm going off on a tangent about
is that by offering coupons and you know, free stuff, if you
offer free stuff from free trials that can cloud your data,
I'm not saying don't do it. I'm just saying that don't use
that as a forecast for how many people are going to continue to
use your product. Because generally, the mass
market loves free stuff and they'll use your product.
If they hear about it and you spend enough on advertising and
they know they can get free stuff, they will go to your
store. But don't take that that data
set as an indicator of continued business.
That's just the Side Story. And it's worth talking about as
we talk about personas here. So as we talked about #7 there,
in terms of defining the motivations and frustration on
our customers, #8 is to just add your own ingredients I guess to
the cook pot around a unique traits, preferences, behaviours,
communication, style, hobbies. You know you can you can, like I
said, breathe life into the personas number 99 is to
present. I guess it's optionally you can
represent this persona in physical form.
You can use use a tool called UX Presenter AI Persona Generator
to generate some detailed personas for you.
You want that to have real data and or you know, you could just
create your own personas, combine all the information
together into a cohesive persona profile, update them regularly,
refine them with data. Some of the main stories won't
change, but maybe the data will keep them relevant.
Maybe even Craden Dashboard. So I hope you've learned
something about personas today. Why we use them, how we can use
them, What they are, where you can incorporate them, examples
of them. And really think about
integrating personas into your BA work today.