One of the best things about living in Seattle is being able to get to know some of the country's greatest online leaders as your neighbors and friends. Tamara Adlin is the founder and principal of adlin, inc., a customer experience consulting company located here in town, and the co-author of The Persona Lifecycle: Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. Before starting her own company, Tamara managed the customer experience team at Amazon Services, creating e-commerce solutions for online and multi-channel retailers. In addition to working with a list of high profile clients, Tamara has led workshops and been invited to speak all over the world on personas and other user-centered design methods. I always love getting together with Tamara; she's the best at what she does and always has practical methods of getting the customer into the center of business strategy and site design.
SM: Lots of retail and e-commerce companies are successfully using personas to drive decisions for both their online and multi-channel experience. For anybody out there who isn't using them or hasn't heard from them, tell us what they are and why they're so valuable.
TA: Sure. Simply put, personas are fake people who represent your key and most important customers. In the best of all cases, they are created with data, and they express customer goals and objectives in the customer's own terms rather than a segment or a role. For example, a segment might be women from 25-54 who use face cream, where a persona might be Henrietta, who is 37 and just starting to recognize her face is changing. Her goal is to figure out a long term plan to solve that problem. A persona is described as a unique person with a goal.
SM: It's interesting that the resistance I have seen to personas in some places has actually come from marketing folks, because marketing is usually charged with knowing the customer and being the great keepers of customer data. The concept of creating personas can seem a little bit threatening and confusing - maybe even contradictory to their efforts.
TA: There are two things I would say about this. The good thing for marketers is that personas are a great way to communicate the wealth of information that they have collected. Marketers should want to communicate the data they have collected throughout the organization in a way it will really be heard, and personas are a fantastic tool for this. Typically, you might give a presentation to present the results of a brand health survey or a bunch of focus groups. The presentation goes great and everyone nods their heads, but a week later they've completely forgotten what you talked about. They're stressed and they fall back on doing things the way they've always done them. On the other hand, it's very easy for everyone to remember who Henrietta was.
SM: The lady with dry skin
TA: That's right. You wouldn't be able to remember details if all I gave you was a bunch of bullet points. The other thing for marketers to remember is that personas are not about targeting. For targeting, you you'd want to figure out what kind of magazines Henrietta reads so you can publicize your value proposition to her in a way she will see it. For experience design (and in this case, I'm talking about 'product' as the web site designed to sell face cream) is really about how she wants to shop for and select a face cream. What kind of questions does she have that need to be answered in order for her to make the decision to actually press the button and purchase?
SM: When you think about it that way, it makes perfect sense because customer segments and personas basically have two different purposes in the organization. You need customer segments to focus your marketing activity and target your communication. You need personas to be able to design the right kind of user experience. So, you are implying that the use of real customer data in creating personas helps to bridge the gap between segments and personas, right? You can use the data in the segments to help create the personas.
TA: Yes, you can, and you should use data to create the personas, and this definitely includes all kinds of data collected by marketing. But what if you don't have the data? Lots of companies can't afford to collect lots of external data. This may sound a little bit heretical, but there's another way to think about data. The knowledge of the customer base that exists within the organization and all of the different brains is valuable data - just as valuable as the external data you collect.
The first thing I think is so helpful about personas is it gets all that knowledge on the table. Once you can share all the knowledge and assumptions that internal stakeholders have in their heads, you can make sure everyone is aligned in their thinking. The power of that agreement is so strong that in some ways you get 80% of the benefit of the personas right there. If you've been in a company for a while, the stuff in your head is not completely ad hoc. It's stuff you know and have absorbed.
Having said that, there are several ways that real data can be really important. If you are in an environment that is very data driven and people won't even listen to you unless you have data, you need to bring in 'real' data.
SM: If we use your Henrietta example, the fact that Henrietta is 37 may actually tie to something we know about a core customer segment being between the ages of 35 and 40, so she's believable because she's actually tied to that data. Would that be a good example?
TA: That would be a good example. Think about a city council meeting where every neighborhood is supposed to send a representative. You're not supposed to bring everybody from your neighborhood. Instead, the group tries to pick someone that can embody the key concerns in your neighborhood. This representative is not going to be in total agreement about everything with everyone, but you count on the fact that there is agreement on the things that really matter.
In the case of Henrietta, her age probably is a very important factor, because her skin care needs are different if she's 25 vs. 37. The brand positioning should be related to her age and particular needs. For other types of products, services, or web sites, age may not be a 'difference that makes a difference' like it does for Henrietta or how she buys her face cream.
SM: You do persona exercises all the time and you work with all kinds of companies in this effort. One of the things I absolutely love about your book is that you make it easy for people to embark on this kind of an effort on their own. Do you ever get calls from people who have tried it and it hasn't worked? What are some of the big mistakes people make when they try to do it on their own?
TA: Absolutely, I get calls about all sorts of problems with persona efforts. The devil is in the details, and that's the reason we wrote the book (and a big reason why it turned out to be so long!). John Pruitt and I started this book back in 2001 after some workshops with a bunch of people who were trying persona efforts and running into problems.
There's one big reason why persona efforts fail: people think they are done when they've created that poster with Henrietta on it and the short description of her. It sounds corny, but a persona doesn't exist in any kind of document. A persona has to exist as a shared understanding in the minds of your organization, or it doesn't exist at all. You're trying to create a common language about your key customers, what they really need and want and what your company really wants to do for them.
People get themselves into trouble when they create personas without getting buy-in, getting the right people together in a room, and helping colleagues understand why the personas are a good idea and how to use them. As you mentioned earlier, personas can cause defensiveness in people i if it seems like the perona effort is infringing on someone's 'turf'. Introducing personas and using them is as much about change management in your organization as it is about anything else. Building real customer focus is a big change. If you don't have a strategy for how you're going to market the personas internally, then you're going to fail.
SM: How can you ensure that it goes well?
TA: Every small step along the way, you have to figure out how to get buy-in from the business stakeholders. Personas are not only an organizational change internally, they are a business tool. Henrietta is only effective if she expresses the business objectives of the company. The only way to figure that out is by talking to business leaders. If you have four personas, Henrietta, Phyllis, Georgia and Beth, you need to get the business stakeholders and executives to determine which is the most critical to our business right now. This is a business decision, not a UI decision.
If you don't involve stakeholders and note their decisions every step of the way, then things are going to fall apart. At some point, somebody's going to say "What about this type of user? What about that customer group? " If whoever this is wasn't involved in the decision making, there's no way you can shut them up, and you just lose it.
SM: If people are jazzed about starting a persona effort, what sorts of things should they do first?
TA: The first thing you want to do is figure out what problem you have, because personas don't solve every problem in an organization. For example, if you think you have a problem with customer focus, you can look at some of the documents related to the work that you're doing to design your e-commerce site or you product and find the references to customers in them. Just copy and paste those sentences into a spreadsheet and see how diverse they are and whether they are really clear. Or you can send out an email saying "I need you to spend 5 minutes describing three of our most important customers. If you were going to pick one out of a crowd, who would that be and what would they want?"
If you collect all of those and they seem randomized and confused, that's when you should start thinking about embarking on a persona effort to get some alignment. There are fast and dirty ways to get alignment, like doing one of the ad hoc persona exercises that's in the book. It doesn't have to take huge amounts of time, but the first step is convincing people that the vision of who the customer is isn't clear and the fact that it's not clear and shared is hurting your business.
SM: Thank you so much for doing this; it was great fun!
TA: My pleasure.
If you'd like to hear more from Tamara, you can check out her blogs:
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