How to Get a Better Understanding of Your Customer: The User Persona
In a world full of competition
The one who can stand out the most is…
Those who understand their customer better
Why?
Because, if you can understand your customer…
You will create a better product, better marketing, messaging, and become a “fit” for them
They will see you as the go-to choice for solving their problem because you know and understand them well, more than the other
So, how to understand the customer better?
The answer is by conducting research
It can be :
- Quantitative Research(Usually survey form)
- Qualitative Research(User Interview)
- or Mixed (Both)
These type of research have their own advantage
for example if using qualitative research, we only need 12 or less users (based on the saturated data) and get a depth answer from each user.
Refer to this The 5 Why Method from previous story to learn how to conduct better interview
After we collected all the data we need
There should be a pattern where the users come with same characteristics, similarity, behavior and even answer.
Then we can group each of the user into a user persona
The User Persona
A fictional representation of your real user (but it come from a real data)
that consist of their profile, demographics, motivation, goal, pain point, and behaviors.
With user persona you can empathize with your user thus create a better journey and product for them.
Some questions to ask the user in order to create data-based user persona
Goals
What are the users trying to achieve with their current state?
What’s success looks like for the user?
Where does the user want to be in the next 1–2 or 5 years?
Motivations
What drives them to achieve their goals?
Why they are trying to achieve it?
What is their biggest motivation right now?
Pain Points / Frustations
What is their biggest frustration right now?
What keeps them to wake up at night?
If they can only solve 1 problem what will the problem they want to solve?
And for the Behaviour of the user
We can ask them about their daily usage of an app
or How they interact with the app
The benefit of User Persona
After we define our user persona based on real user data
We can empathize with them and create more customer-centric products based on their preferences.
There are no more guesstimations because we have understood what our users look like, their motivation, goals, behaviors, and their pain points.
With the user persona in our hands, we can create a data-driven decision that will fit with the user's current situation.
We can create more than 1 user persona, but some resources like CleverTap mention that the user persona should not more than 4. The reason is to group information under the primary persona so that we can focus and gain insight with no complicated process.
Then, after we define the user persona
We can start to create customer journeys to map their entire interaction through our product or business.
We will cover it in the next stories
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Thanks for reading :)
