PERSONAS

Description

A persona is a detailed, realistic description of your users or customers. A persona is created by putting together characteristics (behaviour, motivation) of similar people. You can have multiple personas!

When

In the Imaging phase and the Thinking Improvements phase.

Goals

Creating different personas brings the customer to life. You give him or her a face, a name and (underlying) interests and motivations. You crawl, as it were, into the customer's world of experience. This makes it clear what the service or product means to a specific (potential) customer and what critical factors for his or her satisfaction are. You think from the outside in. This in-depth knowledge of (parts of) your target group provides you with a mirror that allows you to ask the question: how do we view this customer and what does this require from our organisation?

Steps

Divide your target audience into one to four sub-target groups.
Determine the needs and characteristics of these sub-target groups.
Make the personas human by giving them a face, name and interests.
Feel free to add other details that are relevant to you.

Tips:

Make the personas as vivid as possible with a concrete image or photo. When creating these, dare to get deep into the customer's skin by also zooming in on his or her frustrations, fears and obstacles.

Examples

As the Financial Markets Authority (AFM), you oversee many different types of market players in the Netherlands. These differ enormously from one another. Not only in terms of organisation, but also in terms of motives. For instance, a smaller financial service provider may have a completely different motive for his or her service provision than a larger chain. And thus their challenges and needs may differ enormously. Market players can therefore 'be in the game' completely differently. This requires a specific approach. By creating different personas, the AFM empathised with the possible needs, requirements and possible behaviour of its 'customers'.

This is a format that can be used to create personas: