What are User Personas?

6 March 2020

User personas, are an absolutely vital part of Brand Strategy, as they represent fictional characters that are formulated within the Discovery Session. These characters represent the 3 or 4 types of customers that would likely use the businesses brand, website, product or service both now and in the future. In particular it's useful to consider not only existing customer types but desired customer types too, because one of the key tenets of a Business Rebrand is to question existing values and to understand that a fundamental change of approach and presentation will appeal to a new audience.

It's really important to consider not only if the Brand Identity itself would be appealing, but would each of these characters have a different requirement in terms of how they might interact with your business, for example, perhaps someone younger would make contact with you via Social Media, whilst an older person may prefer something more traditional such as calling by phone or sending an email. All of this rationale is not only interesting to contemplate, but should feed into the (UX) User Experience.

Make it as real as possible

We would recommend that not only is the persona given a gender, name and age, but that some key information is also considered to make them as realistic as possible. This should ideally include logical assumptions on how this person might interact with your business either currently or in the future.

For example, try to understand where this person is located, their socio-economic background, their interests, their education level, what blocks or frustrations they may have in their job and of course how it would reasonably be assumed they would interact with your business.

As the digital project continues, it's vital to check back with these personas to make sure that first the Stylescapes and subsequent new logo, colour palette, typeface are all on track. This makes far more sense than basing decisions around personal feelings such as 'I don't like green' or 'I think we should use a serif typeface' which may or may not actually be relevant to the target market. By building up this picture of a hypothetical person, it really does It also helps to alleviate potentially awkward internal discussions, as every decision taken as the project reaches conclusion, can be benchmarked against something independent and rational.