The UX Toolbox - Personas

Know your customer personas, know your customers

There’s a reason it’s called user-centred design – the most successful digital services and solutions are based around the needs, desires, capabilities and limitations of their users.

The most successful way to build a solution around your users is to create valid, well-researched personas. Personas are descriptive portrayals of your intended users that represent some of the most common (or most challenging) customer types.

Many businesses or organisations have market research information about their customers which can be a useful starting point.

To truly get under the skin of your users we use a variety of research methods which let us capture not only demographics and usage patterns of your users but more importantly help us understand their values, motivations, priorities, desires, and barriers.

Storyboards portraying personas’ actions and mindsets throughout their typical customer journey help bring research findings to life.

These presentations of the customer journey further enhance the understanding of your customers and how they interact with your solution.

Personas and storyboards can be used by everyone from design teams, business analysts and marketing through to customer support staff.

They help you envisage the best solution for your users and the evolving designs can then be validated against your personas. Armed with a deep understanding and empathy with your users, we can help you build a great solution with a compelling customer experience.

How will we help you?

We strongly believe in the power of personas and we have created them for clients in all sectors, including Citylink and Citizens Advice Scotland. Applying insightful user research methods, including ethnography and contextual analysis, depth interviews, workshops, surveys and usability testing, we get a clear picture of your users.

Our consultants have a background in psychology allowing them to understand, capture and document your customers’ goals, behavioural traits, pain points, interaction styles and more in a useful, usable way.

Personas and storyboards are great for improving the design of individual digital channels, but even more helpful for considering the multi-channel user experience.

What next?

To learn more about how persona creation can help you, contact us to discuss your specific requirements and individual opportunities.