The folks at the Yahoo! Publisher Network today published an interesting article about Publishing with the User in Mind. The article discusses the necessity of knowing your customer… and also knowing that you are not your customer.
In other words, pay careful attention to who your users are and their characteristics. The article discusses a practice that I’ve used for many years — creating personas. By defining who your customers are and putting a name, face and story to them, your design team or design consultant can design a better site.
Let me illustrate. I was recently hired to redesign a sales process for a client. During an initial meeting with the client, she shared the landing page creative for her campaign and a sample from a competitors’ campaign. One thing we both noticed is that her campaign, while cleanly designed was too “pretty.” Most of her customers were male, and we concluded that a less pastel, more masculine design was needed. Indeed, that more masculine page performed better. Had the first design consultant known this, that consultant would probably have produced a more effective landing page.
The morale of the story? Don’t be shy about telling your web design team who your customers are. Web designers are creative folks, and if you can communicate who your customers are, a designer can create a persona that can be used to make decisions about design, how you market your product or service online and more.
At one of my past employers, we created three personas for typical users of the web site. We first learned a lot about our customers through usability testing and focus groups. We also observed customers in our stores. After we had a good picture of who our customers were, we created three personas that defined the different segments of people we typically marketed to. When the design team went about designing a landing page for a promotion, we always asked questions like
- What would excite Robert [our persona] about these products and how can we use this to our advantage?
- What information would Robert require in order to get him to purchase?
- How can we effectively communicate to Robert how this product would benefit his quality of life?
“Robert” became a real person to us, and we would refer to our personas as real people as if they would be shopping our web site that day. Personas helped us make critical decisions and helped us grow our internet business.
If you’re a designer, ask the client who their customers are, and if you’re a client, be sure to let your design/marketing consultant know who your customer segments are so they can build a more effective solution.
