At Full Fat Things, we always recommend using ‘personas’ for customer projects. For the uninitiated, this might seem like a lot of bother. So we thought we’d explain what they are, why we use them and how you can get the most out of them.

Why personas are worth it

Before we get started, we aren't going to claim we invented personas. Instead, we're writing this because we think the concept is brilliant – if used properly.

In any case, the notion of personas has been around way longer than Full Fat Things. The first mention of ‘user personas’ was from back in the 1980s. But we suspect people may have been using something similar for even longer.

What we're more sure about is that the growth in popularity of personas has risen pretty much in parallel with that of the Internet. If you think about it, with ever more goods and services being purchased remotely, it makes sense to have a picture of your customers in mind. But where personas really come into their own is in clarifying that image for everyone in your company and provide enough detail to make sensible, actionable decisions.

What are personas?

When we pitch for software development work, one of the things we always say is that “We serve people”. Of course, pretty much every organisation serves people, either directly or indirectly. But for larger companies it’s almost impossible to know every single one of your customers well enough to feed that into your development work. The upshot of this is the need to generalise to some extent.

Personas allow you to do this in a helpful way by encapsulating all you need to know about your customers and presenting this as the characteristics of a set of fictional characters. That’s because it’s far easier to consider whether a product is going to be attractive to 34-year-old teacher Joe Bloggs and 48-year-old bus driver Mary Smith than to an audience that’s simply described as having a wide age range, a long list of job titles and a vague income bracket.

When you create and share personas, your staff can more readily empathise with the people they’re serving. It becomes much easier to answer the questions: “What does the customer need?” and “What does the customer want?”

When should we use them?

Personas aren’t only useful at the start of a project. When we work with clients, we’ll encourage you to keep referring back to them as they’ll help you to prioritise what should be developed next. And you can keep using them after development is complete.

Also, personas aren’t static. If it makes sense to do so, they can be tweaked as together we learn more. This way they live and breathe, adding even more value to the user stories we’ll build and refer to throughout the project’s lifetime.

You can create personas for your staff as well. If they’re involved in serving customers, this is a good way to make sure their goals and challenges are taken into account too.

How do I make personas for my business?

If there’s one thing we know about personas, it’s that they only help if they contain a lot of detail. If you want to understand the expectations, concerns and motivations of your customers, you need to know far more than just their ages and job titles.

And there’s no point in creating personas if they don’t represent all your customers. That means doing proper research. This could be a mix of interviews, workshops and surveys. You can also use data collected from your existing applications.

If all of this sounds excessive, bear in mind that you can use these personas across your organisation and not just for a single project. They should become a cornerstone of your business moving forward, so they’ll provide value for a long time.

What do I need to know?

You’ll have to excuse us for stating the obvious, but just to be clear, the attributes you need to understand will vary according to the services and/or products you’re providing. What’s sometimes less obvious is you’ll be researching a mix of personal and professional details.

Among the ones we think you should consider compiling are: age, gender, marital and family status education and career overviews job title, salary, responsibilities, where they get their information from, individual goals, motivations, challenges and needs.

If it’s relevant, you might also want to capture information such as: company sector, products/services, turnover organisational challenges, reporting line their approach to work and managing their team.

Fleshing this out with a photo and a quote really helps to bring personas to life and make them more relatable for everyone who uses them.

And then what?

You’ve created personas to help you align development with your users’ needs. The next step is that everyone involved needs to know what they are and why they matter. We really want to emphasise here how important it is to spend time and effort on this stage. Don’t just send them out via email. Talk to people, answer questions, explain why they’re valuable and how they can use them.

Once you’ve distributed them to your team(s), we at Full Fat Things can use them when we’re writing user stories, which in turn define what should happen at each step of your application – from the users’ point of view.

Then, as development continues, you and your team can use the personas to decide how to prioritise what to develop next.

Personas can also help your teams understand how different parts of the business serve customers. This is where they add extra value. It’s all too easy for teams to become compartmentalised. Talking about ‘real people’ (albeit fictional) makes it much easier for staff to see how each part of the business contributes to addressing their needs.

Some dos and don'ts

There’s no perfect way to create personas. If there was, we’d all be using the same process. But here’s my list of things to avoid if you want to get the most out of them.

Do...

• teach people how to use personas - it may seem like a logical concept to you, but others may have no idea what to do with them
• check they aren't too general - company-wide personas are too broad to meet a specific application, consider creating subsets for the project if this is the case
• get buy-in from the top - if senior management don't understand and/or champion the idea, others soon won't bother with them either; explain the benefits and ask them to get involved from the start

Don't...

• make them up - what you 'think' you might know about your customers may be different from the reality, compare with other managers and you'll uncover variations
• only distribute them digitally - don't assume people will refer to them, often they won't; providing physical versions that people can use in their offices helps to reinforce the persona
• create them in isolation - you can risk alienating those who don't understand them and they won't get used; find ways to get others involved and contribute to their development

How do I get started?

Before we sign off, we’d like to recommend a great resource, which is the UK Government’s digital service manual – and particularly the User research section. It’s a good place to start if you’re looking to build user-centred software.

Then come and talk to us. We can give you examples of how we’ve used personas for our customers and what they’ve helped us achieve. Get in touch: https://www.fullfatthings.com/contact-us