Why create a persona? The idea of creating a persona is to make your decisions more informed whilst designing your site; to pose questions like “Would my target persona react well to that wording on the CTA?” Deciding on your target persona will help you define features and functionality, look and feel…in fact it will help inform every aspect of your website. For instance your target persona may be a young man who predominantly interacts with the web via social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. He is a bit of a night owl and orders his favourite snacks via the internet and there fore demands swift service. We’ve all looked at our target audience before but creating a persona takes this process to the next level by painting an in depth picture of a character.

A target audience of ‘everyone’ fits ‘no one’
When asking about target audience I will receive the response that the target audience is ‘everyone’. Well everyone is no one. A site needs to be designed for one person in particular instead of being designed for no-one and therefore having success with no one. So force your client into thinking harder about this question and you will be more likely to succeed. Fair enough there may be other target personas but get your client to identify a primary target persona and if it justifies the decision you may want to consider a secondary persona.

How do I discover my target persona?
When deciding upon whom your target persona is it may help you to answer the following questions:

• Age: How old is your user. Generally older users will be less web savvy than today’s generations who are web savvy and also likely to use mobile devices.
• Nationality: Where are they from, what language do they speak? There may be colours which have different connotations depending upon the nationality
• Occupation:
• Education:
• Lifestyle:
• Activities:
• Frequently visited sites of user:
• Habits of the user:

So the next time you begin a project
Pressure your client to be specific in their description of the target persona…refuse to except the answer of “everyone”. Finally ask your client if they have any market research or character profiles in order for you to create a persona and use this to inform your decisions throughout the design process. As you progress through projects you will be able to build up a library of persona profiles which you can also use to help inform future projects.

Creating a target persona just one part of contextualising. Read more on how you can use context to inform your website design.

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