Customer personas: their role in business and design

User personas are generalized images of ideal customers created based on market research and real people. They help companies understand and empathize with their target audience, resulting in more effective marketing, sales, and product quality.

Creating an accurate picture of your customers doesn't have to be expensive. By researching the characteristics and desires of your customers, you'll gain insight into who they are and be able to significantly improve your customer service.

What is a user's identity?

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on your current (or ideal) customer. You can create user archetypes whose goals and characteristics reflect the needs of a broader group of users by segmenting them by various demographic and psychographic data.

The description of a particular consumer group usually includes age, industry, preferences, values, goals, relationships, and other data important for building an image.

To create general images (personas) of customers, divide them into groups according to the selected criterion and answer the following questions for each group:

In the table below, we have collected several archetypes of Torgsoft customers to show their differences and ways to segment them according to certain criteria.

What are their goals and motivations for shopping? This question is necessary so that you can understand how your product/service actually fits into your customers' lives. Why do they use it? What problem are they trying to solve?

What barriers prevent them from achieving their goals? Once you know who your users and customers are and what they are trying to achieve, find out what prevents them from buying or using your product.

Why do we need user personas?

A deep understanding of the target audience is useful for growing a business and creating exceptional products. It helps you uncover the ways people search for, buy, and use products. Knowing this, you can improve the experience for real customers when using your product or service. 

Personas help to solve different tasks:

Find the answer to one of the most important questions: "Who is your product for?" 

By understanding the expectations, concerns, and motivations of your target users, your product or creative teams will be able to develop a product that best meets customer needs and therefore is successful.

Anticipate user needs

By understanding your customers, you can realize that different people have different visions and expectations. The more you interact with your users, the more you know their characteristics and differences, the more likely it is that your product, service, communications, interface design, and marketing activities will hit the mark.

Make more accurate marketing decisions

Personas allow you to create more targeted and personalized marketing messages, which can increase their effectiveness. Companies can better reach their customers by using language and communication channels that resonate with their target audience.

With the help of different personas, marketers and designers can test different usability styles, create an optimal user path on the site, interaction scenarios, and touch points with the company. 

For example, instead of blindly creating navigation buttons, a UX designer can justify their decision: 

It's worth noting that while customer personas can help designers prioritize interface and navigation elements, they can't be used as the only tool for determining anchor points. 

Increase customer conversion and loyalty

In general, a personalized approach to communications can lead to increased customer loyalty and higher conversions over time.

Cost optimization

Understanding where and how best to invest your marketing budget is achieved through understanding your target audience. This allows companies to focus on the best strategies and engagement channels that are most likely to achieve their goals.

5 steps to create a user persona

There are many ways to create personas — it all depends on the budget, the type of analysis, and the data you can collect. 

Here's a general outline of how to create customer personas:

1. Gather information about your users. 

The most accurate personas are based on real field research — they are extracted from interviews with users, surveys via forms about their needs, customer reviews in various sources, and live communication experiences.

When it is impossible to interview/observe real people and there is no money for full-fledged testing of the target audience, you can create a customer portrait based on the feedback stories of the sales and support departments.

At this stage, it is very important to avoid creating stereotypical images of users that have nothing to do with the real ones.

2. Identify behavioral patterns based on the data collected.

At this stage, it is important to find commonalities and patterns in the results of user research that will allow you to group similar people according to certain criteria. 

In the example above, we chose demographic and behavioral criteria for individuals: industry and age. It can also be the size of the business and the geographic location. Match the criteria to real customers with the appropriate set of variables. Determine the trends of people grouped by at least five variables (common values, needs, goals, and obstacles to your product). 

3. Create characters and prioritize them.

Next, it is important to describe each personality group around the dominant criterion. Include demographic and social data, behavioral patterns, goals, and fears. However, avoid personal details: too many details will make the personality less reliable as an analytical tool. 

Most interactive products have multiple audience segments, so it makes sense to create many different personas. However, if there are too many, the process can get out of hand. The characters can simply blend together.

4. Find scenarios of character behavior.

Characters have no value by themselves. They only become valuable when they are tied to a scenario. A scenario is an imaginary situation that describes how a character will interact with a product in a certain context to achieve their ultimate goal. 

Scenarios help marketers understand the main user flows: by combining personas with scenarios, they collect requirements and create design solutions based on these requirements. Scenarios should clearly articulate the use cases of a product or service that are most likely to occur.

The resulting scenarios form a holistic picture — the user journey on the site and describe different options for interactions (touch points) at each stage of the marketing funnel. 

The ideal user scenario: getting to know a brand through a Google search → studying its assortment and product → making a purchase decision → brand loyalty.

5. Make decisions about messages, channels, and content

Based on the different types of target audience, your creatives and developers start looking for the best and most harmonious ways to solve customer problems: in design, service, content strategy, etc. 

It's important that the whole team gets to know the new faces and treat them as real people. Put up posters and postcards with your users to keep them in the spotlight.

This way, professionals involved in product creation and promotion will constantly remind themselves for whom and for what purpose they are implementing various marketing and business ideas on a daily basis.