4.1 Communication and value
We’d like you to think about communication as a two-way dialogue. One of the critical points of this dialogue is finding out who you are talking to.
In the design-based approaches spilling out from the development of technology into enterprises, it is becoming increasingly common to use a ‘persona’ to capture the different types of customer. Personas can help you to model how your customers might interact with your products or services. Personas can be simple and just concentrate on age and occupation. However, you will gain more insight from more sophisticated personas.
Activity 4 Developing a persona
Identify the different customer segments you want to target and represent them as personas. At this stage it might be largely guess work, or you might have a reasonably detailed understanding of your ‘ideal customer’.
Try to include as much detail as you can. You might want to write it out as a narrative, including details about each person and imagining how your product or service meets their needs. Alternatively, you might want to draw a picture. Just do what works for you.
This resource from the Interaction Design Foundation ought to help:
Personas – A simple introduction [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
Discussion
Developing a persona of an ideal customer is difficult. Often the process will tell you more about what you do not know, and highlights the gaps in your understanding. These gaps might be at the level of how much the customer might be willing to spend, but they might also show how little you know about how to communicate with your customers. In particular, it might show how you need to think through how different people in different contexts might understand the explicit and implicit meanings contained in your communications.
Developing a persona is one way of capturing what you know about your customers, as it gives you someone to talk to when you try out your communications. Lots of other ways exist, but developing a series of personas can be a useful way to sense check any communications before you press ‘send’.
4 Developing a communications strategy