Personas

User Personas   |   Economic Buyer Personas

Personas are tools used to represent important characteristics of an audience or set of users, or buyers. Each persona is an archetype within the audience. They represent a significant pattern of behaviors, needs and expectations within the audience population.

Personas themselves are used in combination with scenarios to generate relevant ideas for solving the problems of a particular archetype, as well as to critique proposed ideas when making decisions about which ideas to pursue. Scenarios are narrative forms of use cases (i.e. triggers/goals for using a product or service in a particular instance). A persona is like a character in a story, a scenario is a particular scene or story arc.

Personas and scenarios are high-value tools used to generate conceptual designs and services. I create them to help design teams develop empathy for a customer in a given situation. They help us think about and document the thoughts, feelings, etc. that the individual (persona) is going through in the context of their scenario.

Most, organizations have a goal of increasing engagement and driving people to use additional products and services. Rather than try to manufacture needs and use cases for these, a better strategy is to introduce these additional services at a time when the user is already engaged and the service is most relevant (i.e.has the highest perceived value).

​By starting with scenarios, which are situations in which we know individuals are already engaging with their insurance provider, we can then ask questions like: What other questions/challenges does this individual have? This allows us to think about potential, viable touch points for increasing and extending engagement with customers.