March 12th, 2007 - Personas Give the Customer a Seat at the Table
When it comes to product design and product development, arguments are inevitable. I have yet to see a better tool for effectively and efficiently resolving these disputes than personas.
It’s still a slightly odd scenario. As the designer, product manager and engineers hit the half-hour mark in their heated debate about a clever-but-infrequently-used component of the software product, someone wisely says, “well, what do you think David would want?” On that, we all turn our heads to look at a laminated poster of the wall containing a fictional sketch of a customer who doesn’t exist.
Suddenly the answer is clear – no point arguing really. David is so time-starved and results oriented, he wouldn’t want any extraneous features to interrupt his regular flow. Turns out the answer was written on the wall for us the whole time.
Personas take the ego out of the design process and allow the team to renew their focus on actual customer needs. It’s no longer a battle of wills, an “I want” vs. “you want” locking of horns, because the customer’s needs are clearly displayed and take precedence.
It takes occasional reminders to get the full value of personas. I’ve seen them used at various stages of the project. And whenever things get fuzzy I’ve found that dusting off the personas generally leads to good burst of productivity as objectives again emerge clearly.
For these reasons, and the clarity around customer motivations that personas provide, they are increasingly included in best practice recommendations from industry experts. In 2006 Forrester published a review of the public websites of Australia’s four largest banks (ANZ Bank, CBA, NAB, and Westpac). The findings include:
- All four sites contained major design flaws that force customers to use the more expensive call center and branch channels or switch to competitors out of frustration.
- Each of the major banks could save more than $7 million a year by making their sites easier to use.
- And, “this will only happen if they build a design-centric culture, using design personas, and learn from their international counterparts.”
We’ve been building personas for years at Quarry, subtly refining our methods with each new project. We’ve learned many valuable lessons about the right form of customer segmentation, geographic representation, ethnographic-style observation. We’ve found effective ways to layer quantitative analysis along with the qualitative observations, and honed our methods of grouping seemingly disparate observations into tangible clusters that help define key differences between one persona and another.
Done right, the payoff is worthwhile and quite satisfying for everyone – especially the end user.