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Dave Chaffey

November 8, 2012. 17 comments

Web design personas

Creating personas of website visitors is a powerful technique for helping increase the usability and customer centricity of a web site as part of a

user-centred design (UCD) process. I’ve been a big fan of using personas since around 2003 I was introduced to it by Matt Dooley, a customer

experience manager in the HSBC Global Ebusiness team. At the time they were following reports by Forrester on creating personas.

This shows that they’re certainly not new, indeed their equivalent of using customer thumbnails for customer segmentation or ad campaigns has

existed for decades. However, I find they’re still not so widely-used when giving examples on training courses.

What is a website design persona for marketing?

A simple definition of a web persona is: “a summary of the characteristics, needs, motivations and environment of a key type of web site user“.

A more specific definition from the Foviance/Seren guide to Segmented personas is:

“A persona is a fictional character that communicates the primary characteristics of a group of users, identified and

selected as a key target through use of segmentation data, across the company in a usable and effective manner.

This ultimately enables the company to design the best user experience for its customers at all touchpoints, which is a key success factor in today’s

business environment”.

Recommended Guide : Download our Guide to Creating Customer Personas.

Our guide for Expert members has more examples of different types of personas including ad hoc, marketing and web

design personas and advanced techniques for creating effective personas.

Example personas

At their simplest, Personas are essentially a ‘thumbnail’ description of a type of person. Here are two simple examples for a music publisher selling

music clips and sheet music to a business audience.

Persona 1 – George: George is a 45 year old violin teacher who has used the Internet for less than a year. He accesses the Internet from home

over a broadband connection. He has never purchased online before, preferring to place orders by phone.

Persona 2 – Georgina: Georgina is a 29 year old ad exec who has been using the Internet for 5 years and uses her Macbook, iPad or Android

phone to access the web – whatever is to hand.

You can see that these are quite different types of people who will have quite different needs. Some companies simply use personas at this level.

True design personas have a more detailed narrative and summary of customer goals and characteristics as some of the examples later in this post

show.

The best way to understand the power of web design personas is with examples. Here are two classic examples I use in training.

B2C web persona project example

Imagine the challenge of making a consumer site about paint engaging. These examples from agency.com show how they used personas to make

the Dulux web design more customer-centred. Here are some details of the project shared by Dulux and their agency who still use the approach

today.

The objectives of this persona project were:

An introduction to using personas to create more customer-centric websites

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Positioning statement:

“Dulux.co.uk – the online destination for colour scheming and visualisation to help you achieve your individual style from the comfort of your

home”

Targets:

To increase the number of Unique Visitors from 1M p.a. to 3.5M p.a.

To drive 12% of visitors to a desired outcome (e.g. ordering swatches)

Target audience based on research insights for the user-centred design:

Would be adventurous 25-44 women, online

Lack of confidence:

Gap between inspiration (TV, magazines, advertising) and lived experience (DIY sheds, nervous discomfort)

No guidance or reassurance is available currently on their journey

Colours and colour combining is key

Online is a well-used channel for help and guidance on other topics

12 month decorating cycle

Propensity to socialise

Quality, technical innovation and scientific proficiency of Dulux is a given

6 personas were created with 5 female reflecting the main audience of the site and involvement in the buying process. Each has not only a name,

but a label to characterise them.

Examples of Personas developed:

FIRST TIME BUYER Penny Edwards, Age: 27, Partner: Ben, Location: North London, Occupation: Sales Assistant

Persona example for Penny

PART TIME MUM Jane Lawrence, Age: 37, Husband: Joe, Location: Manchester, Occupation: Part time PR consultant

SINGLE MUM Rachel Wilson, Age: 40, Location: Reading, Occupation: Business Analyst

Each persona is encapsulated by a statement showing how they approach interacting with the brand, for Penny it is summarised by the statement:

“I’ve got loads of ideas and enthusiasm, I just don’t know where to start”

A storyboard was developed with illustrates the typical “customer journey” for each persona and these informed the final design as shown in the

figures below.

Storyboard related to Penny

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Current home page design

This example shows the clear inspiration message with tools to help with selection of products in the right sidebar.

Detailed “persona home” page design

This is the specific “inspiration” page.

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Multichannel personas across the whole customer journey

I like the way that Dulux extend the key messages across their customer journeys.

Here are their Google Sitelinks which highlight the proposition of different types of content nicely.

Dulux even extended their use of personas offline into TV ad campaigns based on the original web concepts.

I hope you found this example interesting! You can read original detailed PDF on persona creation.

B2B web persona example

This example is brief, but illustrates the main type of characteristics that should be thought with a B2B persona including:

Personal characteristics

Company role

Work and career goals

Work challenges

Tasks

Key messages

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The image (doublelclick for a larger example) shows example personas created by design agency cScape for the CIPD for a training directory (used

with client permission). You can see that the definition of the persona includes both business and personal issues and goals along with key

messages or services relevant for this persona. Typical of B2B personas the 8 personas developed in this example encompass a range of company

sizes, personas and responsibilities within the buying unit.

Combining personas with customer scenarios or customer journeys

Customer scenarios (customer journeys) can and should be developed for different personas. Patricia Seybold in her book: The Customer

Revolution, explains them as follows:

A customer scenario is a set of tasks that a particular customer wants or needs to do in order to accomplish his or her desired outcome.

You can see that scenarios can be developed for each persona. For an online bank, scenarios might include:

1. New customer – opening online account

2. Existing customer – transferring an account online

3. Existing customer – finding an additional product

Each scenario is split up into a series of steps or tasks before the scenario is completed. These steps can be best thought of as a series of

questions a visitor asks. These questions identify the different information needs of different customer types at different stages in the buying

process.

The use of scenarios is a simple, but very powerful web design technique that is still relatively rare in web site design. Evidence of the use of

scenarios and persons in sites are when the needs of a range of audiences are accommodated with navigation, links and search to answer specific

questions. Clear steps in a booking process are also an indication of the use of this approach.

The approach has the benefits of:

Fostering customer centricity;

Identifies detailed information needs and steps required by customers;

Can be used to both test existing web site designs or prototypes and to devise new designs

Can be used to compare and test the strength and clarity of communication of proposition on different web sites.

Can be linked to specific marketing outcomes required by site owners.

Finally, I have some top-level guidelines and ideas on what can be included when developing a persona. Start or end with giving your persona a

name. The detailed stages are:

1. Build personal attributes into personas:

Demographic: Age, gender, education, occupation and for B2B, company size, position in buying unit.

Psychographic: Goals, tasks, motivation

Webographics: Web experience (months), usage location (home or work), usage platform (desktop, tablet, mobile), usage frequency, social

media sites, favourite sites in and out of category

2. Remember that personas are only models of characteristics and environment:

Design targets

Stereo-types

3 or 4 usually suffice to improve general usability, but more needed for specific behaviours

Guidelines on developing web design personas

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Choose one primary persona whom, if satisfied means others are likely to be satisfied

3. Different scenarios can be developed for each persona as explained further below:

Write 3 or 4, for example:Information seeking scenario (leads to site registration), Purchase scenario – new customer (leads to sale), Purchase

scenario – existing customer (leads to sale).

Once different personas have been developed who are representative of key site visitor types or customer types, a primary persona is sometimes

identified. Wodtke (2002) says:

“Your primary persona needs to be a common user type who is both important to the business success of the

product and needy from a design point of view – in other words, a beginner user or a technologically challenged

one”.

She also says that secondary personas can also be developed such as super-users or complete novices. Complementary personas are those that

don’t fit into the main categories or display unusual behaviour. Such complementary personas help ‘out-of-box thinking’ and offer choices or content

that may appeal to all users.

Thanks to our expert commentator, Richard Sedley of Foviance for contributing these.

1. Get sign off from all key stakeholders in business that these are accurate representations of their audience because if they disagree the

personas won’t get used (which is what usually happens).

2. How personas are presented is also essential: Create pocket cards of people in projects to carry around, place on front of reports and

documents to show who target audiences are, create life-size cut outs. One of our clients is even proposing using actors for a day so that staff

and team members can ‘meet their personas’

3. Personas are used to help those in teams that might never meet the customer. Development team use them to ensure that as specs change

(which they do) in a project life-cycle you don’t lose site of who you are designing and building for.

Please share your thoughts or experiences with personas, including negative ones!

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Guidelines on applying web design personas

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