Week 10: Challenge Activity

For our week 10 challenge, we were asked to produce a buyer's persona:

Brief

Ardath Albee defines buyer personae as “composite sketches of a segment of your target market that inform the creation of content strategy that will turn prospects into buyers” (Ardath, nd). Their use is pivotal in summarising everything you have learned from your audiences in an easy to digest overview of a made-up person.

Choose one of the artefacts you have worked on in the previous two rapid ideation sessions, and create a single persona that might identify with your chosen artifact.

For that purpose it might be helpful to develop some user stories. As a reminder, a user story should loosely follow the structure:

As a <role>

I want <something>

So that <benefit>

Consider engaging in further research on marketing personae and then share the results in the forum. Peer review is encouraged so make sure you review each other's work. For that purpose, also remember to share a link to the artefact you are focusing on, so that your peers can be sure to try it, if they haven’t already.

Details required for your persona:

• Name

• Photo

• Role

• Brief description

• Key quote — summarising user goals for the system

• Demographic information

• User goals

Looking at the brief I immediately thought of user personas. The user persona was developed by Alan Cooper, a leading mind in the world of interaction design who found himself having imaginary conversations with the fictional character Kathy, who was based on a real worker he had interviewed while developing a complex piece of software in the early '80s (Lupton, 2017). Finding the process useful, Cooper developed the idea of the user personas. Cooper and his team talk in more detail regarding persons in the Interaction book About face: the essentials of interaction design(2014):

"Personas provide us with a precise way of thinking and communicating about how groups of users behave, how they think, what they want to accomplish, and why. Persona's are not real people, but they are assembled from the behaviors and motivations of the many actual users we encounter in our research."

(Cooper et al,. 2014)

Under closer inspection, however, I realised that the brief was asking for a Buyers Persona rather than a user persona - a subtle difference. Buyers and users can be quite different and have different motivations. To distinguish these, Josh Seiden highlights:

• Marketing-target personas that model purchase motivation

• Interactive persons that are modeled towards usage behavior

(Unger et al,. 2009)

The buyer or buyers of a product may in fact be part of a decision-making unit(DMU) if the product is to be used in a business environment (B2B) (Vedenin, 2021). The DMU may not even contain the end and often involves a proxy or an advocate. Even with Consumer products, the end-user may not necessarily be the buyer; this can especially be the case with products and services for children. In this scenario, the parent is typically the purchaser (buyers persona) and the child the end-user (user persona). Each has its own needs and motivations which may or may not align.

Which Artefact to choose

Having completed two rapid ideation sessions I had a choice of two different concepts to produce a buyer's persona. The first (Drop dead gorgeous, a mobile phone app that helps users pair the clothes they already have with new clothes and accessories to stay fashionable) was a consumer app which I felt would be easier to create a persona for as the buyer and the users would most likely be the same. The second ideation (The Monster that Keeps Me Safe, an iPad app that helps social workers and children work through the child's emotions and trauma) was an application with both multiple users and potential buyers/decision-makers. The intricacies and bureaucracies of local authority spending were not something I wanted to explore or try to understand at this stage of the process, nor would it would serve in helping me understand creating a persona, so I decided to develop one for my first artefact.

Reservations

I felt that building this persona was akin to shutting the door after the horse had bolted. The concept was already fairly well-formed and although this was a "buyer's persona" rather than a "user persona" the two are intrinsically connected. I felt fortunate during the ideation phase that I had given some thought to the type of user who would benefit from the app, but I had not done any qualitative or quantitative work to support my hypothesis. Supporting my reservations, this week's linked content from Ardath Albee notes the process of developing a persona requires effort and research, particularly with internal and external interviews; which she views as essential (Albee, n.d.). I also found evidence derailing the use of personas in general in the article Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics:

• Increased complexity – personas are not able to capture the diversity and nuances of the increasingly large online audiences. Typically, one would create only a few personas (less than 10) to describe the core users which may not be enough in the era of online analytics and fragmented consumer behavior.

• Redundant information – personas are overly focused on superficial demographic information instead of focusing real needs and wants of the customer base. Also, the information presented tends to be static and not dynamic.

• Lack of prediction – personas are descriptive and not predictive; they cannot be used for prediction, unlike other analytics tools.

(Salminen et al., 2018)

I could understand the criticism. The personas were often static, where which seems out of step with the idea of Agile as a whole. The use of statistics and analytics, however (which Salminen and his team put a case for), would allow the team to shift their approach after each sprint as the insights would be based on real users, in real-time, and show actual real behaviours. Salminen goes on to discuss Digital data-driven personas (DDDPs), which bridge persona creation between quantitative data and computational techniques(Salminen et al., 2018)

Having this all swimming in my head, I felt a little unprepared and concerned about the validity of the process. I had to remind myself I had done some initial research during ideation, regarding the growing trend of older women, in particular, celebrating looking good rather than looking young. (Mair et al, 2015). Seeing as the use case was built into the ideation during Opposite Thinking, I decided the best I could do was to work from my hypothesis and initial research, rather than extensive analytics or qualitative insights.

Developing the persona

Already having some general idea of the target user was incredibly useful in creating the persona. I started writing out my user story and took the approach described by Doug Rose in his LinkedIn Learning course Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories (Rose, 2019). Using 3" X 5" index cards I was able to draft out a concise user story pretty quickly:

As a maturing woman of style, I want to be able to stay fashionable, confident and relevant, so I can look and feel great about myself inside and out.

The story was directly informed by the initial concept, how to pair the clothes you have to stay fashionable, so I found this fairly easy to generate and was a great starting point that led to the reset of the persona.

I decided to use the index card approach for the other components of the persona but found this a little more challenging and went through multiple drafts. This was partly because I was dissatisfied with the initial drafts of the personal bio and motivations and felt they were based on stereotypes and assumptions. Eventually, I was able to settle on details I was happy with.

Buyers persona - Jade Mathews

I found it very interesting while looking for inspiration for personas, that a good proportion of them were of people under thirty years old. I am not ashamed to admit that this fact may have gone unnoticed by myself if I wasn't developing the persona of a maturing woman. I was also unsatisfied with the images generated with Generated Photos (n.d.) (it seemed to distort and duplicated part of the generated images' hair) and instead decided to purchase a stock image from Shutterstock. I also decided to use a free template (which I highly modified) from Adriano Reis (Reis, n.d.) on dribbble.com, so I could focus on the content rather than the layout.

The Buyer Persona Jade Mathews

Reflections

Although I had reservations about producing a persona after the ideation phase and had found arguments against their use, I did find it enjoyable and can see some benefit at this stage. It could be a good validation tool to ensure you and the team have a firm understanding of the use case and target audience of your artefact. I looked again at how the user stories relate to the Envisioning process described by Al Parker in the course content and noticed that this usually happens after a Product Vision is generated. I began to wonder - although not explicitly stated in the brief, were we meant to create a product vision as well? At this stage, I had not fully explored the process outside of the notes given in the course literature, so I'll set a SMART goal to investigate the techniques to produce one, such as the elevator pitch and product data sheet, further.

SMART GOAL

I will learn more about vision formats so I can apply them to my existing artefacts produced during my rapid ideation sessions. I will read Essential Scrum by Ken Rubin and and produce two versions based on two of the techniques. I post them in the spark forum before the 15th of April under my buyers profile.

I plan to incorporate the user and buyer personas earlier on in my process for upcoming modules. As there is an entire module dedicated to research, I am pretty sure this will be addressed. Eric Ries describes the use of User Stories by the entrepreneur Farbood Nivi as:

A technique taken from agile development. Instead of writing a specification for a new feature that described it in technical terms, Farb would write a story that described the feature from the point of view of the customer. That story helped keep the engineers focused on the customer's perspective throughout the development process.

(Ries, 2011)

So for Farbood, the stories are being used for individual features, rather than a high-level concept of an application. Persona and stories have overlapping characteristics but should be utilised at different stages of the process. Both seek to cut through the technical details and put the square focus on the user (or in the case of the buyer's persona, the purchaser/s). In any case, it frames the solution as a way of meeting a user's needs, wants or frustrations and encourages empathy and understanding over a technical exercise.

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References

Albee, A., n.d. Buyer Personas - Marketing Interactions. [online] Marketing Interactions. Available at: <https://marketinginteractions.com/buyer-personas/> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

Cooper, A., Cronin, D., Noessel, C. and Reiman, E., 2014. About face : the essentials of interaction design. 4th ed. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley, p.62.

Generated Photos. n.d. Unique, worry-free model photos. [online] Available at: <https://generated.photos> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

Lupton, E., 2017. Design is storytelling. 1st ed. New York: Cooper Hewitt, p.92.

Mair, C., Wade, G. and Tamburic, D., 2015. Older Women Want to Look Good Despite Media Pressure to Look Young. The International Journal of Aging and Society, [online] 5(1), pp.1-10. Available at: <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/285334270_Older_Women_Want_to_Look_Good_Despite_Media_Pressure_to_Look_Young>.

Reis, A., n.d. User Persona Template - Sketch Freebie. [online] Dribbble. Available at: <https://dribbble.com/shots/9066208-User-Persona-Template-Sketch-Freebie> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

Ries, E., 2011. The Lean Startup. London: Portfolio Business, p.132.

Rose, D., 2019. Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories. [online] LinkedIn. Available at: <https://www.linkedin.com/learning/agile-at-work-planning-with-agile-user-stories/creating-user-stories-2?autoplay=true&resume=false&u=56738929> [Accessed 1 April 2022].

Salminen, J., Jansen, B., An, J., Kwak, H. and Jung, S., 2018. Are personas done? Evaluating their usefulness in the age of digital analytics. Persona Studies, 4(2), pp.47-65.

Unger, R. and Chandler, C., 2009. A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making. 1st ed. Berkeley: New Riders, p.113.

Vedenin, Y., 2021. The difference between buyer and user personas explained. [online] UXPressia Blog. Available at: <https://uxpressia.com/blog/user-persona-vs-buyer-persona-difference#:~:text=Buyer%20personas%20aren't%20necessarily,with%20different%20goals%20and%20expectations.> [Accessed 1 April 2022].