We’ve learned that one of the best ways to ensure robust ROI for any website or web app project is to first build an accurate profile of the “desired and likely user,” which we can then use throughout the process to guide key architectural, functional, and aesthetic decisions which would please this “desired and likely user”.  Shorthand, we call it the persona approach.  We didn’t invent it, but it’s really common sense when you think about it.  Say you’re building a house…for whom?  That’s the starting point.

You may care to read Steve Baty’s recent article on the UXmatters site about the building blocks of persona research.  Baty’s overview of the concept is particularly useful as a starting point:

Personas are archetypal representations of audience segments, or user types, which describe user characteristics that lead to different collections of needs and behaviors. We build up each archetype where the characteristics of users overlap.

According to Alan Cooper, author of About Face 3.0 with Robert Riemann and David Cronin, “The persona is a powerful, multipurpose design tool that helps overcome several problems that currently plague the development of digital products. Personas help designers:

• Determine what a product should do and how it should behave.
• Communicate with stakeholders, developers, and other designers.
• Build consensus and commitment to the design.
• Measure the design’s effectiveness.
• Contribute to other product-related efforts such as marketing and sales plans.”

But where do we start looking for the data we need to build up these useful archetypes.

Baty suggests surveys, ethnographic research, interviews, contextual inquiries, and web analytics as the primary research tools to formulate a meaningful persona archetype.  Even for our tiniest projects, ENTERMEDIA tries to get as much information as possible upfront about your probable site or app user so that we can efficiently build assets they can and will use.  As Baty puts it:

One important thing to consider about these different research techniques is that each of them is good in certain ways and can provide insights into different characteristics of your audience. A common refrain among UX practitioners who are looking at personas is to draw upon as many different sources of data as you can. This helps you create a much richer representation of each different persona, but also helps you arrive at much stronger set of personas. Each data source has its own built-in bias, so combining data sets helps mitigate that bias.

You can read the full article here.