10. 11. 2012.

Web design personas - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice

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Web design personas

Dave Chaffey
November 8, 2012. 17 comments

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

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. Ive 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 theyre certainly not new, indeed their equivalent of using customer thumbnails for customer segmentation or ad campaigns has
existed for decades. However, I find theyre 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 todays
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:
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Web design personas - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice

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:
Ive got loads of ideas and enthusiasm, I just dont 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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Web design personas - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice

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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Web design personas - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice

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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Web design personas - Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice

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.

Guidelines on developing web design personas

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

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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
dont 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.

Guidelines on applying web design personas

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 wont 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 dont 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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