I’ve included a template persona — download it here.

If I’m working at a client that has an idea for a site or application, but they can’t identify the target audience i.e. users of the site, I sit the client down and ask them, “so who are these people that you want to make money off of?” They usually don’t know, so in an effort to define that audience, I do just that — define the target audience — with personas.

How important are they?

Your target audience affects almost every decision you may make for a website or application.

This includes technology selection, look and feel, interface design patterns to use, the tone of voice the content may take. Personas are used by the business owners to define their target audience, can be used for understanding the application and gets everyone up to speed, from designers, information architects and developers to business users.

The personas may even effect if you do the project at all or not: if your web application can’t meet the needs of the personas, is it really worth spending money on at all?

Personas are used to enforce the spirit and direction of the application, and more often than not are the foundation of a website or an application design.

What’s A Persona?

Personas describe fictional characters who your target audience is.

They describe five typical actors that cover 80 percent of the site audience based on any demographics that can be ascertained from what the site is, or what the competition already has. Sometimes that can be hard, if you are starting service that no one’s ever seen before, or trying to define a new market segment.

For some projects, the personas are easy to define.

Take the Apple iPhone versus Google’s Android G1: Who are using these phones? Does open source or cost of applications affect their buying decisions? Do they need or not need keys on their phone? So they like slick versus ease of use? All off these details would be used to describe the users that may or may not fit the personas required for your project.

Why You Should Do Personas For Every Project?

The biggest issue I’ve seen with many of the consulting projects I’ve worked on and on internal projects is that we had not a single document describing the target audience for the website or application, because the client hasn’t done any market research. Usually, the client or the company wanted a website, and we built it regardless if it fit the target audience.

In absence of studies and other detailed information about their target audience, personas are the first attempt to define their target audience and further define any decisions made about features and functionality. In a few cases, not only did the personas further define the project that we were working on, defining the target audience radicially changed the perception of what the application or website should be, and thus the feature set changed drastically. Clients forget their audience shouldn’t be everyone, because an application designed for everyone fits precisely no-one (or, just how many 90 pound children like wearing an XXL t-shirt?).

Or, imagine telling your client this approach wasn’t going to work, at all. That’s a fun conversation to have.

Personas not only define how the target audience should be approached in human computer interactions, but the complete brand experience. How you speak to a person with limited computer knowledge versus an expert is very important, even in email and customer service communications.

The personas can be written by the client, or the web designer, or the programmer. Usually they are constructed by the information architect or business analyst; most imporatnt, they should be done by a key figure that needs to have an intimate knowledge of who they are designing for and can communicate it to other team nembers.

Who Should The Personas Describe?

Once we have five typical users selected, describe them in semi-fictional detail:

• General Information
  • Age
  • Ethnic Background
  • Occupation
  • Education
  • Home Life
  • Lifestyle
  • Activities
• Web Usage
  • Web Competency
  • Frustrations with the Web
  • What kind of information is hard to find
  • Frequent sources of information
  • How notified about the website
• Why, How, Barriers
• Typical Use Cases

It seems like overkill, but typically we’re able to fit this into one page. The amount of information to include should be enough to be intimately familiar with the personas as friends, but not too much to overly define them (like, do they drink Coke vs. Pepsi?). For fun, attach pictures: your co-workers and clients will identify with them as a target audience easier with a visual representation.

I like injecting a bit of humor here, because people inherently have a sense of humor (one project I worked on, we named the personas Jim Coder and Johnny Bedroom, and after a few weeks, the personas became the goal of who we we’re targeting so much so the developers used them in conversations). The approach defused a very stressful situation, and made the project more fun.

If you can get it on one page for each persona, you post it on the wall — everywhere.

Even the smallest websites benefit from at least sketching out who the typical users are: one project I worked on was a shopping cart for niche aftermarket automotive parts. The products covered six years of a specific make and model manufactured by an American automotive manufacturer, and the site was targeted as such.

We’re talking of a potential audience of no more than 100,000 people, but very targeted.

The result?

The site had a mailing list 6,000 members deep, and the owners sold the company for a huge profit.

Where Can You Find Information For The Personas?

Exactly one of our clients I’ve worked with had the information we needed to start on detailed personas; the client provided us with reams and reams of reports based on focus groups that they did on their audience, and their target audience was a few hundred thousand people. Additionally, there were resources online that even further define who they were targeting. Not all the way to psychographics, but close enough to affect project approach and design.

The result: detailed personas we could use to match up just about any user, including walking into any bar or restaurant in the locality the website was for and identifying if patrons were not only the target audience, but which persona they fit in.

For most projects, this is not the case, so the best way to go about this is sitting down the stakeholders and asking them: so, who’s going to use this application? After defining a target, use anything you can find (web reports, similar applications, researching the marketplace) to further define the personas.

If you are really lucky (by meaning the client has money to pay for this), you get to do contextual interviews i.e. watching in the target audience in their native audience. This can be everything from watching them for just an hour to diaries full of their daily activities. Most imporantly, it’s key that you figure out what they are doing and not what they are saying by watching their tasks.

I usually research websites that are close to the feature set but don’t completely match what they are developing. For internal projects, we model them after some of the stakeholders we meet in face-to-face meetings, changing the names and ages of the personas to protect the innocent.

What Happens If Personas Aren’t Defined?

Good question: what happens if you don’t know what the target audience is, and the application built doesn’t meet their needs?

There are studies about the failure of software projects and not all of them are because of failing to meet the target audience, but if ten percent of them are, how much money are we talking about? Millions? Billions?

I’ve been involved with a lot of software projects, and there’s nothing more frustrating that a project that goes off the rails and doesn’t meet the needs of the user. Money’s wasted, time’s gone, and we’re non the better for it, other than another frustrating experience. We do learn from our failures, but we should have more successes.

But here’s a better metric to go by: A Standish Group survey found that the number one reason that IS projects succeed is because of user involvement (Standish Group). stolen from Classic Mistakes Enumerated. That’s an old study, but think about that: if the target audience gets involved, projects succeed.

Number one reason.

End of story.

So just how important is that target audience again?

Other Resources

• I’ve included a template persona to start from. Download it here.
• Our tax dollars have gone to a really good resource over at Usability.gov.
• George Olsen has a good article over at Boxes and Arrows about personas.

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