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One of my favorite examples of where personas really helped was driving both strategy and design for a wholesaler. Through research, one of the personas that f

by gav 9y ago

One of my favorite examples of where personas really helped was driving both strategy and design for a wholesaler. Through research, one of the personas that fell out was "man with a van", that is a sole proprietor who did most of their work out of their van. Two key insights were: 1) The median age was higher, being in the 50s they were starting to thinking about the retirement and handing over the business. Even if they had little interest in engaging with digital, their protégé would, and ignoring digital would mean losing market share in the future. 2) They were on the road a lot, and mobile-based experiences would be helpful over having to call/fax orders, bills, etc. However research showed that their biggest complaint was the small size of UI elements for both reading, and more importantly clicking on (lots of complaints about how hard mobile website were to use with fat fingers). I hope this was useful; I find well developed personas useful to keep in mind the disparate users of a system, what they are trying to achieve, and how. There was a comment about validating personas as part of user stories, which I'd recommend.

dhimes 9y ago
That is a useful anecdote- thank you. Just to be sure I unerstand: You had an intended customer base who used a mobile office of sorts, and by exploring the persona you could drill down and discover certain usability issues as well as a future to bear in mind. The persona exercise helped make this clear. Something like this, fleshed out with more detail, would have been great to include in the original article. It shows how personas can be a useful framework for exploring potential markets (or niches, maybe).
- gav 9y ago
  Just to clarify, the intended customer base was made up of various types of customers over different axes: big companies, small business, people that work in purchasing, people that recommend products, and so on. It's useful, to me at least, to come up with personas that are based on clusters of customers (based on research) so that every design choice can be validated against the impact to them. Each persona may have a different goal or priority. The other use is when thinking of scenarios for personalization, what data can be used to segment customers? It might be useful to have a dashboard on the homepage showing the status of POs and bills for somebody in purchasing vs. showing previous items ordered to facilitate reordering for somebody else.

by gav 9y ago

dhimes 9y ago

That is a useful anecdote- thank you. Just to be sure I unerstand: You had an intended customer base who used a mobile office of sorts, and by exploring the persona you could drill down and discover certain usability issues as well as a future to bear in mind. The persona exercise helped make this clear. Something like this, fleshed out with more detail, would have been great to include in the original article. It shows how personas can be a useful framework for exploring potential markets (or niches, maybe).

gav 9y ago
Just to clarify, the intended customer base was made up of various types of customers over different axes: big companies, small business, people that work in purchasing, people that recommend products, and so on. It's useful, to me at least, to come up with personas that are based on clusters of customers (based on research) so that every design choice can be validated against the impact to them. Each persona may have a different goal or priority. The other use is when thinking of scenarios for personalization, what data can be used to segment customers? It might be useful to have a dashboard on the homepage showing the status of POs and bills for somebody in purchasing vs. showing previous items ordered to facilitate reordering for somebody else.