Do you know how your end consumers look like? Do you know what they eat?drink? Where they live?
Oh well..should you actually know all this? Is it really relevant?
Yes. For the simple reason that you need to understand what your customers expectations are and why they use/do not use your product? What are the social/technical reasons that drive your customers to use your product?
And if you don’t know all this, how will you “wow” them? How will you build services for these users, unless and until you don’t know their face and what they do in real life!
Think of mapping your users to Product Personas.
What’s Product Persona?
A persona is a fictional person who represents a major user group for your product.
“Personas are character sketches which represent a typical member of one customer segment and highlights their needs, goals and behaviors. Because it is representative of a customer segment, it allows decision makers to prioritize various features based on the needs of the segment.
Because it is a character sketch, it is sometimes easier for decision makers to internalize the key needs of the segment than it would be by reading reams and reams of data “[wikipedia]
Why do it?
Apart from helping you in concentrating on customer segments (and prioritizing them), Product Personas also helps the team (engg + product) in understanding
- Users’ goals and needs
- Users’ interaction with the product – i.e. whether they are a heavy user or a casual one? Whether they need full-attention while using the product or not, in short usability/design constraints of the product, w.r.t the target segment?
- Most importantly, you will not end up with “self referential design/product” where you start believing that you are the end user of the product; and end users are like you – which is never the case.
- Before designing/developing a feature, the entire team should ask “Will Mr. X use this feature? Will this feature help him“?
How to do it?
Product Persona typically includes:
- a name and picture
- demographics (age, education, ethnicity, family status)
- job title and major responsibilities
- goals and tasks in relation to your site
- environment (physical, social, technological)
- a quote that sums up what matters most to the persona with relevance for your site [source]
An example:
Product Personas are typically constructed after conducting focus group studies and several user scenarios, but as a startup you need not spend tons of money on this. Just look at your analytics tool, combine that with search queries (that reach your site) and of course, your own perceived segmentation of user base and you can go ahead with creating personas.
Lets take the example of pluggd.in itself. Even though this is a content site (and NOT a product per se); and doesn’t have actionable components (which are typically the interactive features with other entities like users/features of the site, be it scrapping @ orkut, or sending resume@ Monster), i.e. you only consume the site content and comment/email sometimes, lets attempt to create a product persona for pluggd.in.
pluGGd.in has three distinct customer segments – wannabe entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs and VCs. Let’s take ‘wannabe entrepreneurs‘ persona and call him Ravi.
About:
Meet Ravi. He is 27 year old engineer, a bachelor, stays in a metro city (say, Bangalore) and works for an IT company (has work experience of ~4 years). He loves going to technology focused events like Barcamps/FOSS and enjoys meeting like-minded people (i.e. techies/wannabe entrepreneurs).
Ravi is interested in learning more about Indian startups/Businesses, reads magazines like Businessworld, and regularly visits sites like TechCrunch/ReadWriteWeb/GigaOm etc.
Key attributes:
- Techie by heart.
- Want to startup or Join a startup
- Wants to see cool Indian tech products making big in India/world.
- is interested in knowing about latest Indian startups and tech.
- network/communicate with like-minded people; learn from other entrepreneurs.
What matters to Ravi?:
“Ravi is interested in knowing more about starting up – right from taking the first step, to business validation, how to approach VCs etc’; and is also interested in staying updated with India Business (especially Internet/Mobile) related news. He also seeks inspiration from entrepreneurs and guidance for his venture”
As the editor of pluggd.in, my job is to ensure I meet Ravi’s expectations. Before writing any new post, I should make sure that Ravi reads it (and comment on it, share with his friends, talks about it)! Right?
Got the feel of Product Persona?
If you are a product startup and wish to go thru’ the same exercise, let me know. We can do the entire exercise (you need to provide me data about user segments/usage of the product) and will publish the findings here.
Game?
This is Brilliant Post.
btw – that Ravi is me
, i.e. my pic! 
college days pic ??…
great thoughts . startup often focus too much on tech that they underestimate the importance of understanding a user and establishing a connection with user . ideally every intreaction with your product should make user feel happy and important . and it cost nothing i see this being used remarkably well in Twitter ,
when you twitter scan your GMail address book to find out which of your friends are on twitter they shows a message saying
” We’re loading your contacts.
(It may take a bit longer if you’re popular.)
”
similarly when you change your profile picture Twitter says
“that’s a Nice Pic ”
technically significant ? No
funny and feel good ? 100%
all it takes is a little creativity .
Well written article. Definitely it’s very important for a product to meet the requirement of the consumer. The customer has many options so in order to divert the traffic towards your product, it’s very important to satisfy the customers in all its aspect. Thanks writing the article as it will definitely help many upcoming entrepreneurs. I will be waiting for more such information.
Good post. We used personas a lot at Hotwire, but I seldom found them useful. They are great constructs to get started, to help you probe who your customer is, but they are too fluid to convert into designs. Nothing beats a real person, a real user – who talks to you, gives you feedback and guides you to a solution. I think personas create a false sense of understanding of the user, the product is still created in vacuum, just that now the product manager think he/she has thought through the use case.
Where personas are useful is when you have absolutely no customer whatsoever and there is no competitor in the market. When we first designed firstphera.com – our average user was a 24 year old girl who’s getting married in 6 months, has a job in design or marketing, but is way too pre-occupied in her wedding preparations. The eventual design looked fine and met the requirements; but our persona was only 20% right.
By the way, here’s a good post from the folks at 37signals
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/690-ask-37signals-personas
Vikas -37signal’s statement “Every product we build is a product we build for ourselves to solve our own problems. “…in itself is a big nightmare.
Statements like these should be taken with BIG pinch of salt – not everybody in the world (including product mgrs/engineers/marketing) can have the same understanding of customer pain.
Personas, in my opinion (and experience) helps us to level out the definition and prioritize products across the entire team.
“Where personas are useful is when you have absolutely no customer whatsoever and there is no competitor in the market. ” – I don’t agree with that statement – it all depends on what areas of persona defintion have you looked at. A lot of persona definition should come from insights (both qualitative and quantitative).
@Ashish – i think they follow that up in the next para with “We recognize not everyone shares our problems, our point of view, or our opinions, but that verdict’s the same if you use personas. Making decisions based on real opinions trumps making decisions based on imaginary opinions”
For some, like me, talking to real people is far more productive than virtual. When you are developing a completely new market like Henry Ford’s cars vs horses, personas are probably the only way to go about it. Many startups are in the same situation, so they’ll probably need it too. We used it too.
They work for some, they don’t for others. When given a choice, I’d not use it, but that’s a personal choice.
Vikas – the point is its’ easy to say ‘real opinions’ – but who is the real user? how many users can you speak to? Will you take their feedack as-is?
Lets take a step backwards and talk of market research – if i have a market research for diff. clusters (of users) substantiated with factor analysis, it makes sense..but not otherwise
From my personal experience, personas help both the engg+PM team+most importantly, user experience researcher in validating the feature priorities.
But again, it all depends on how the entire thing is executed- it’s all ‘persona’l