Personas can be one of the most important strategic tools for enabling the design of human-centred products, services, and experiences. At the heart of every strategy is people – be they customers, employees, stakeholders, influencers, or others – so developing relevant, detail-rich, and applicable personas is an invaluable strategic tool for nearly every organizational goal.
Most Personas are Pretty Useless
For what should be an important strategic tool, the unfortunate reality is that many personas fall short of their potential utility, commonly because of these shortcomings:
Limited Planning + Foresight: Often, personas are created without a clear plan for their application across projects.
Lacking Detail + Insight: Many are little more than sketches without the substantive insight needed for real value and utility.
Short Half-Life: Often created as one-off projects, personas often rapidly become outdated, limiting their mid- to longer-term utility.
Low Organizational Awareness: Insufficient internal circulation limits cross-departmental application and alignment.
How to Create Impactful Personas
Addressing the aforementioned issues can elevate personas to realize their full potential. Here’s how:
Plan How Personas Will be Used
Define their role for current and future projects, tapping product and experience roadmaps and longer-term strategic plans as guides.
Solicit Inter-Departmental Input
Engage departments and teams beyond your own to solicit input on the creation and use-cases for personas, ultimately broadening their application and value.
Research Planning + Insight Application
Plan what you hope to discover from your research, and importantly, how those insights will be applied to current and future projects. Exploratory research can also be valuable for uncovering new insights and opportunities, but breadth of research needs to be balanced with depth to ensure substance in what is learned.
Build Personas Around Goals, Behaviours, or Mindsets
How you classify and organize personas should be dependent on how they are going to be used. Avoid typical demographic- or psychographic-based personas in favour of those designed around peoples’ goals, behaviours, or mindsets to better enable you to glean meaningful insights, satisfy people’s needs, exceed their expectations, and produce desired business outcomes.
Update + Optimization Planning
The people represented by your personas are dynamic, so your personas should reflect that dynamism through commitment to regular updates and optimizations. Design and operationalize systems to evolve personas with further research and organizational learning, enhancing your knowledge, insight, and opportunities over time.
Integrate Personas With VOC and VOE Programs
Elevate their organizational profile by integrating personas, their insights, and updates into your Voice of Customer (VoC) and Voice of Employee (VoE) programs, maximizing their utility and value.
Ultimately, personas should be detailed, dynamic, and applicable components of every strategic toolkit, and should significantly elevate your organization’s ability to serve needs and provide value to customers and employees.