5 ways to enhance Personas: For action

20 Jul

Discover 5 ideas you can use to make your Personas more actionable for product development, service design or content creation.

Go digital & multi-page. Action-focused Personas require space and depth.
Base your Personas on a ‘Jobs to be done’ objectives-based segmentation
Provide context and scenarios for your Personas
Identify & visualise the drivers and barriers to behaviour change
Include a Persona’s behavioural biases

Ditch the templates, re-think & re-energise

Personas are a mainstay of the user experience, user-centered design and more recently, marketing Worlds. They’re an important tool for visualising and providing focus on the customer or target audiences, and their needs. But despite their ubiquity in modern businesses, Personas have rightly come in for some flak in recent years for their lack of actionability and the reductive way they try to distill the complexities of people into a neat one-page summary. The established Persona format and content is rightly being challenged: uninspiring, shallow and lacking in the ‘so what’ and ‘what next’.

But you should not give up on Personas, it’s not the concept that’s the problem but the execution. If we revisit what Personas were meant to achieve and review all those unloved illustrations of your customers that have been left on the shelf, we’ll quickly see the standard structure, format and content of Personas are both tired and not fit for the purpose. Our list below aims to show that with a refresh and an injection of creativity Personas can again be inspiring, actionable and practical tools for product, service or content development.

Before we jump into this list, we’ll assume that you are already building Personas based on real people, research and data. If not, please do have a quick read of our post, 5 ways to enhance Personas: For empathy , which covers our thinking on this fundamental stage of Persona creation. Now let’s take a look at the list…

1. Go digital & multi-page. Action-focused Personas require space and depth.

Your first reaction to the suggestion of adding more content to Personas might be ‘how am I going to fit this all into a single page?’. Well, the first tip is don’t try to fit everything into one page in the first place. Those criticisms of the simplicity and reductiveness of Personas can result from this one-persona-one-page practice that has become the norm, often stemming from standardised templates or canvasses. When working with our clients we’ve found these one-pagers can be great as a summary introduction and a crib sheet to get to know and feel the Persona, but they are not enough to then move on to understand what you should build for this person to deliver value and what their experience should be.

We’d recommend that each Persona has a summary page that will be familiar but that this is also augmented with a number of follow-up pages and supporting content that raises the actionability and empathy generated. Think of Personas as ecosystems of insight about your potential users. Go beyond a single page and create a PDF deck, online flipbook, or webpage for each Persona. This article here and its partner piece, '5 ways to enhance Personas: For empathy’, show some examples of what additional content might be valuable to include. But, the content should also be guided by your users (and their desired outcomes) and your brand (and its desired outcomes) to make sure there is a good fit. For example, you wouldn’t create a Persona to be used for a streaming music app that has the same content categories as one for a grocery retailer.

2. Base Personas on a ‘Jobs to be done’, objectives-based segmentation

This one is crucial. Rather than choose arbitrary demographic or role-based segments on which to base your Personas, building them around the objectives of your users will deliver much more purposeful and action-focused personas. Think about yourself, do you consider your needs, personality and behaviour to be inherently the same as other people on your street or in your office who are the same age, gender and profile? Hopefully not. We all have our distinct needs, experiences, situations, passions and quirks that influence the brands we choose, how we behave on any given journey, whether our needs are fulfilled, how we feel, etc.

In the ‘Jobs to be Done’ (JTBD) framework, made popular by Clayton Christensen and Bob Moesta, the ‘Jobs’ are the objectives a person is trying to achieve and they seek / use solutions (brands, products or services) to help them progress to completing or fulfilling these ‘jobs’. The JTBD are independent of current solutions and brands. They span Functional, Emotional and Social objectives. And, there will normally be over-arching jobs (eg To become more fit and healthy so I can make the most of my life) and related jobs (eg Finding a way to exercise that fits in with my busy lifestyle). As a proven catalyst for innovation and creativity, some have positioned Jobs-To-Be-Done as an alternative to Personas but we believe they are naturally complementary and amplifying. JTBD cannot exist without the context of the people (Personas) who want to make progress towards fulfilling an objective and the Personas offer little usefulness unless we know what they’re trying to achieve (Jobs).

The best objectives-based segments are not going to be brainstormed in a workshop with your colleagues. Trusted and actionable segments would ideally be based on research with the full diversity of your potential audiences. The segments can be based on exploratory qualitative research (e.g. Jobs to be done interviews and diaries) but would ideally involve quantitative surveys and analytics (e.g. using a trade-off technique like MaxDiff) to identify and size segments of interest within your market. You would then recruit people who share the distinct objectives or groups of objectives, and that align to your brand, to take part in further qualitative research, to shape and populate your Personas (all with real-life information).

Crafting Personas around Jobs-to-be-done segments will provide an anchor and purpose for each persona. It delivers tangible and actionable insights that can often be missing.

3. Provide scenarios to provide context for the Persona

Personas should represent real humans and as the complex species we are, we all adapt and act, think and behave differently depending on the situation and context. The starting point when thinking of making Personas more actionable is trying to understand their scenario: the situation they are in, what experiences they have, how well they are being served by current solutions, and their pain points. Without this background scenario, Personas will always have limited practical value.

Aim to give your Personas clear scenarios (situations, challenges and experience) to explore that will potentially inspire new solutions, i.e. ideas for great products, features or content. So what should a Persona scenario look like? When writing scenarios we take inspiration from jobs stories and need statements:

PERSONA SCENARIO STRUCTURE: As a [User Persona] who [describe the pain / desired gain] I want to [the need] so that [the Job-to-be-done]
AN EXAMPLE PERSONA SCENARIO: As a [live music fan] who [often misses out on concert tickets] I want to [to know sooner if bands I like are playing nearby] so that [I get to have fun, memorable experiences with my friends].

Depending on your brand and market, your Personas might have just one relevant scenario to explore or many. For example, if you’re developing a music streaming app, there will be multiple scenarios, situations and Jobs to be done that can apply to a single persona, e.g. discovery of new music, preparing for a party, bonding with friends, etc.

We’d also recommend visualising the Persona’s mindset and experiences during the scenario by creating an empathy map to convey the Persona is Doing, Thinking, Seeing, Hearing and Saying. This should again be based on research to be both authentic and useful. See '5 ways to enhance Personas: For empathy’ for more information on using Empathy maps with your personas.

4. Identify & visualise the drivers and barriers to behaviour change

When using Personas, one of the end goals will often involve getting someone to change their current behaviour, e.g. getting customers to try a new product or service, getting users to change how they complete a customer journey or encouraging people to switch from a competitor brand to yours. Understanding what pushes or pulls a Persona in one direction or another can prove invaluable in design, strategy and marketing of services. If this fits with one of your challenges then we’d recommend including a visualisation to understand the drivers and barriers.

Developed by Bob Moesta (yes, him again), The Forces of Progress model is one such simple framework to visualise the drivers and barriers to changing behaviour from its current status. This model includes four quadrants which we populate for each Persona based on research interviews and diary studies.

PUSH (Problem): These are the pains and friction they experience with current products, services or behaviours that push them towards switching, i.e. limitations or frustrations with current solutions
PULL (Attraction): These are the things that attract and pull them towards switching to new products or services, or changing their behaviour, i.e. additional benefits or features of an alternative solution
ANXIETY (Uncertainty): These are the worries or concerns they have about changing their current product, service or behaviours, i.e. what would they risk losing or what new problems could they encounter if switching
ALLEGIANCE (Anchor): These are the things that anchor them to current products, services or behaviours and make it difficult to switch behaviour, i.e. what encourages inertia and stickiness with current solutions

Adding a switching summary to your Personas provides actionable insight that could help develop the experiences and communications that encourage change over the status quo.

An example of how we use the switching model (mock content)

5. Build in behavioural biases to guide interventions

We all have behavioural biases and use cognitive short-cuts that drive our decisions and actions as much as, if not more than, our reflective rational thought. And whilst we’re all susceptible to our subconscious leading the way, we don’t all share the same biases and we don’t follow them to the same extent. Some people (and therefore, Personas) will be more System 1 wired in a given situation, acting on their gut, others will be more System 2, reflecting and rationalising before making decisions. The specific cognitive biases that influence our subconscious decision-making will be different too, for example, some Personas will be more prone to ‘Status-quo bias’ and ‘Loss aversion’, whilst others might be more influenced by ‘Contrast effect‘ and ‘Appeal to novelty‘. These behavioural quirks, of which there are hundreds (see here), can prove valuable in shaping the experiences and communications that are created to influence different personas.

As a first step, we would recommend adding a System 1 vs. 2 weighting to the Personas to help guide the type of experience you build. For example, a heavily System 2 Persona is going to want a lot more information and detail in their product or journey than a System 1 Persona. As you explore and review behaviour across a number of test scenarios or journeys (eg making a product choice, completing an experience journey, etc) you’ll get a feel, based on the steps, touch-points and timings where your Persona fits on this scale.

As a second step, we’d recommend showing the cognitive biases where the Persona is more prevalent than average to be influenced by that trait. For example, a Persona who is heavily influenced by ‘Social proofing’ and ‘FOMO’ will be more likely to convert if they see that other people, like them, are using a product or service and benefiting in a way that they are not currently. There are a huge number of biases out there and the ones you include will depend on your brand, audience and market. Try to choose 5 to 10 biases that are relevant in your space and visualise these as part of your Personas.

Armed with this valuable information, experiences and communications can be built that target the subconscious triggers that are prevalent within a Persona.

An example of how we present behavioural bias in Personas (mock content)

Wait, there’s more…

We hope this has provided some inspiration for enhancing your Personas. Shifting your personas from single-page summaries to ecosystems of insight about users, will amplify their value and could be the springboard for that next great idea.

We’ve also written a partner piece to this article focused on how to use Personas to build empathy and closeness with customers: 5 ways to enhance Personas: For Empathy

Read now