Why you need to create personas and specify your users and customers for any product you want to market
Design thinking has always been something I looked up. I remember those days when people had to adapt to the conditions and tools they had to use because there was no alternative.
There would be only one browser, one website (if any) to book your trip, to order pizza or to do anything else. Today you have a wide variety of different platforms, sites, applications and more. And all of them want their customers.
Which is more important, they want their customers to be happy and satisfied with the service they use.
I first encountered the term “persona” a year ago when I started working as an internal product manager in a consulting firm. Even though I was working with Universities and Libraries before in a B2B environment, this term never occurred to me. I was surprised how much I missed out and how much it could have helped me to be a better PM.
Now I know what to do! Now I am always ready to work not just with “customers” but with “personas”!
We are currently working on a case-study for a Championship in Business Solutions with my team. I wrote a post about us working remotely and yet succeeding. I also have to mention that we made it to the semifinal, got a High-Quality Award and now are working on the new project: a social media and a platform for people interested in healthy lifestyle.
It was really confusing in the first place to see the market we might want to target until I decided to focus on personas.
It helped me to segment our users into three categories:
1. Users and people who are interested in a healthy lifestyle and need support, motivation, and metrics to track their results
2. Influences and people related to the health industry, bloggers, and celebrities who would love to connect with their followers, grow their fan base, become more popular and earn extra money.
3. Doctors and medical experts in health and nutrition, who do not want to be a celebrity, but would not mind to give some advice to people struggling with their diet plans and earn extra money for this.
That worked extremely well, however, we still did not know how to make it work and what problems to focus on. One of my teammates found himself lost in understanding the need of the problem and we had to spend a few hours figuring it out. I realized we needed some visuals otherwise we are not going to go far. The deadline is early in the morning this Friday.
I used a software to create three personas, each for the segment I stated above.
Anna represents the users. The main target audience for our platform. A resilient and active woman, in love with social media. Unfortunately, she does not have anyone near to her with the same attitude toward a healthy lifestyle and would love to connect with others. She also loves celebrities and reads their blogs, and having celebrities on the platform would be even more stimulating for her.
I was also thinking that the interface of the web-pages should be friendly and contain lots of gamification moments, such as running broccoli, flying carrots or anything, that would make the experience fun, pleasant and rewarding.
Irina represents the community of lifestyle and health bloggers, who love being online all the time helping users deal with complicated diet and inspire others to be better. Irina too tired of the amount of social media she has to handle to promote her website and wants to have a place where she can have all the target audience for some feedback and tests. This is also a great chance for her to promote her business and attract more customers.
Innokentiy represents doctors and nutrition specialists who do not want to be a celebrity or appear on TV but yet want to help people balance their life and nutrition in accordance with last and modern medical trends. He is a father of two small kids and obviously needs and an additional source of income.
Surprisingly enough, creating personas cleared the image a lot! We started to understand what is going to happen next, how we can stimulate people to register and keep up with their progress. How to attract celebrities and what to offer to them.
We are still in the middle of the process, but I feel it is a good start!
