Why you need to breath life into your personas

I have long-used personas as an integral tool in any web development process. But all too often, once the site is up or the product launched, they are left behind as we walk away into the new era. Job done. And the personas are left to die.

Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different user or audience types that might use a product or engage with content. They are composites characters based on data and research with real users. A persona represents the needs, behaviour, attitude and external environment of a segment of your users. A persona allows you to step into the shoes of your audience, helping you to identify with them and focus on meeting their needs better.

During the re-development of vInspired's digital platforms we realised early on that we wanted - and our success needed - the personas to live on. We didn’t want them to be used as temporary models to aid re-designing our online services and content, then consigned to the bin when the job was done. We needed living, breathing entities that would continue to help us focus our content and function for our users.

We follow user-centric design principles and agile development methods, so the idea of the the project never being finished, ‘always in beta’, probably reinforced this realisation. The content strategy that is core to our vision sealed the deal. The personas must live on as long as content creation and user-centred improvement goes on. The personas must represent the organisation wide audience and not be just a niche toy to keep the Digital team amused.

This is, of course, not a new idea. It’s always been the ideal. But so many times I’ve seen the personas disappear into the shadows. The vision becomes hazy and the expertly targeted content and user experience splurge into something that doesn’t serve anyone well, any of the time.

You have undoubtedly spent a lot of time and effort creating your personas: drawing on research and data insights, compiling qualitative data through interviews and workshops with your users, gaining cross organisation consensus on the persona types and their priority. You should put as much effort into ensuring they are adopted and loved afterwards and extracting the maximum benefit.

So how do you ensure your personas live on?

We had a few ideas at vinspired: laminated persona sheets for everyone’s desk, coasters, screensavers, posters on the back of loo doors, paintings on the office walls, lifesize cardboard cutouts placed strategically around the office and Foldable.me versions of each persona. We haven’t done any of those.

What we have done is embed the personas into the Content Management System workflow. Every time a new piece of content is requested or created we agree it’s primary persona. This is an option within the CMS. The persona overview and illustrative picture is displayed on the side of the content edit page, forever reminding and steering the content creator or editor of the primary intended audience.

We've yet to see how well this works, but results so far are promising. It’s helped me and the team focus when creating content; our PR, Programmes and Knowledge & Innovation teams have all been caught referring to and using the personas in their work, and everyone thinks it’s perfectly normal when we ask what persona we are doing something for.

Our challenge is to keep the personas alive for the next few years (in which they may grow) so I've not ruled out any of the more crazy ideas. Yet.

What are your ideas for embedding personas across your organisation and giving them the breath of life? If something has worked for you I’ll buy you a beer if you share it.

This article is dedicated to Baz.