Personas

What Is a Persona?

A persona is an archetype created to represent a “category” of users in terms of goals and behavioral patterns. This research method allows you to personify key behavioral, demographic and technographic data from targeted segments.

Personas are mainly qualitative. As for usability testing, individual interviews and focus groups, their creation is based on a qualitative research process. However, quantitative methods such as Web analytics and surveys can strengthen the results.

Even if personas are useful to target customers, persona ≠ market segment (blog post in French)!

Why Create Personas?

Personas give a better understanding of how distinct groups of users interact with your website or mobile application. You can then provide a customized experience to each persona or simply target the one with the highest value for your company.

Have you already been on a website where you had to choose your profile, such as client, employee or student? If so, there is a strong possibility that personas have been used to offer a personalized experience.

What Is the Process Surrounding the Creation of Personas?

The first step is to identify together which dimension of your users you wish to investigate.

Is it their attitude toward your brand? Their decision-making process? Their goals? Their demographic profile? Once we clarify what you need to know about your clients, we can choose which qualitative research method needs to be used to create one or several personas. Depending on your goals, we decide if integration of quantitative data in the process can add value to your personas. imarklab provides you with a detailed profile of each persona to be used in your current or future Web and mobile projects.

You are wondering how personas can guide conception or optimization of your website? Have a look at our infographic about the University of Montreal (blog post in French)!