We all think that buyer personas are great in that they form the basis of user-centered design, so that your B2B website can be designed in such a way to match how your buyers are using it. This leads to a better user experience, which goes a long way toward helping to nurture your leads into eventually converting buyers. Of course, that’s what’s generally been thought…but is this really the case?
In this post, we explore how buyer personas really impact web design.
Surprisingly, the research actually paints a drastically different picture of how both designers and user-experience professionals view and use personas.
It actually turns out that research reveals that many designers and user-experienced professionals have problems with using these all-important personas when they’re planning the design of websites. Further, they believe that paying too much attention to personas will interfere with their creative ability as they come up with the design for websites.
Surprisingly, the research actually paints a drastically different picture of how both designers and user-experience professionals view and use personas.
The scientific study —that was a joint project between IBM Research, Google and the University of California at Santa Cruz— disproved long-held assumptions about designers and user-experience professionals, specifically related to how they work with buyer personas.
At Market 8, we can’t stress to you how important using personas is right from the very beginning, when you’re still in the infancy of laying out your website.
That’s what today’s blog post is all about: explaining how designers and user-experience professionals should use these personas and also how they can be formatted to ensure that they can use them.
Why Do so Many Designers and User-Experience Professionals Dislike Personas?
The study in question that forces us all to look at long-held assumptions about personas in a radically different way examined how experienced designers and user-experience professionals both used and perceived personas in their work.
The results weren’t good, to say the least. The majority of them only had a use for personas when it came to communication, but definitely not for design.
We argue that that’s a huge problem since we fully believe that personas are an integral aspect of any successful marketing strategy, which obviously includes your B2B website.
PROTIPDesigners should be thinking of various aspects of any good B2B website—the information architecture, the user experience, etc.—with personas front and center in their minds at all times.
What was particularly troubling about the study was that designers and user-experience professionals identified not just one or two reasons why personas don’t work for them, but four reasons in total.
Here are the four reasons that designers and user-experience professionals gave for why personas didn’t sit right with them:
- Personas are too abstract – It is too difficult to understand the entire abstraction process from mere user data all the way to final persona. As a result, personas are viewed as missing very critical details.
- Personas are too impersonal – Tying in with the abstraction problem above, the details within personas that personify buyers don’t provide enough of a sense of empathy.
- The personifying information of personas is too misleading – It is too hard to single out personal information that doesn’t create a false constraint on the entire design process.
- The personifying information distracts – Various personifying details within the persona make it challenging to concentrate exclusively on the aspects of a persona that are essential to solving the design problem.
Key Insights From This Study
As you can see, there are quite some issues that designers and user-experience professionals have with personas. It’s also interesting to note what they say about what would help them do better with personas and also how experience and knowhow can influence how they feel about the use of personas.
Having firsthand experience with the users and direct access to user data were viewed by designers and user-experience professionals as helpful in avoiding the four problems mentioned above. That certainly makes a word of sense, as creating personas is all about really understanding your buyers, which goes way beyond what a mere profile is.
Having firsthand experience with the users and direct access to user data were viewed by designers and user-experience professionals as helpful in avoiding the four problems mentioned above.
It’s also interesting to understand how designers and user-experience professionals feel about personas based on their backgrounds and experience with personas.
The study revealed that, believe it or not, those with the most formal design training felt the most negative about personas. On the other hand, those who had special training and more experience with the use of personas felt a lot more positive about them—no surprise there.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the study is how designers and user-experience professionals misuse personas when working on projects for their clients.
When they use personas, it’s not to help guide the marketing strategy for the company. Instead, it’s to do three different things, all of which subtract from how powerful personas can be if they would be used appropriately.
Currently, most designers and user-experience professionals only use personas:
- To communicate with others
- To drum up support for an already selected design
- To advocate for specific user requirements
This illustrates that only those designers and user-experience professionals who have been introduced to and taught the usefulness of personas appreciate their value in their work for clients. This naturally begs the following question, “How do we get designers and user-experience professionals to feel more comfortable around personas and appreciate them as an integral part of design?”
“How do we get designers and user-experience professionals to feel more comfortable around personas and appreciate them as an integral part of design?”
That’s precisely what we’re going to cover in the next section.
What Can Be Done to Get Designers and User-Experience Professionals to Use Personas More?
Sometimes, the best answers are the simplest. Designers and user-experience professionals have to be shown the benefits of using personas, so that they can develop an appreciation for how vital these boosters of usability and user-focus are.
PROTIP For starters, designers and user-experience professionals should be repeatedly reminded by their bosses that they’re essentially working on the marketing side of things by designing and developing websites.
This is particularly true for B2B websites, as B2B websites are an important part of any B2B’s overall marketing efforts. When designers and user-experience professionals concentrate on the fact that they’re engineering a company’s marketing efforts by designing a website, they’ll learn to accept that personas should guide their design from day one.
Designers and user-experience professionals have to realize and respect the fact that personas yield amazing benefits for companies if they’re used early on in the whole design process.
According to an exceptionally insightful article from HubSpot, personas empower companies to:
- Understand the needs of their buyers
- Figure out where buyers spend their time
- Attract better-quality leads
- Display consistency across all aspects of a company’s business
- Obtain superior, closed-loop analytics
- Reach superior product or service development (read: giving your buyers exactly what they want)
What this evidence shows is that designers and user-experience professionals who don’t build personas into their planning from the very beginning are doing a disservice to their clients.
So how should they approach personas so that they’re part of B2B website planning right from the beginning? We’re going to delve into a highly detailed process of how designers and user-experience professionals can use personas and how they can be formatted to make it easy for them.
How Can Designers and User-Experience Professionals Use and Format Personas?
The key to success lies in how designers and user-experience professionals think about personas from the get go. First things first: They should think about who the users of the website are. This will immediately help to cut down on any problems of abstraction or impersonality. As a bonus, it will immediately empower designers and user-experience professionals to empathize with the users or buyers.
For instance, if the project is designing for a B2B website that provides security services, thinking about what specific tools and equipment companies wanting to guard their premises care about the most is a good start. On the other hand, if the project is designing for a B2B website that offers automobile manufacturing parts, then thinking about displaying an easy-to-use menu with navigation pointing to hoses, tires, radiators and other vehicle-related equipment is a must.
With that out of the way, formatting becomes extremely important to establish a coherent persona.
PROTIPA good start is by asking highly relevant questions to better identify who the users or buyers of a B2B website are going to be.
Some key questions to ask include:
- What’s the professional background of the buyer?
- What’s the highest education level of the buyer?
- How old is he or she?
- Why and when is he or she going to visit the B2B website?
- Is he or she receiving any information from other sources (read: websites) that address his or her pain points?
- What sort of technological devices, apps and software does the buyer use on a regular basis?
- What’s the motivation of the buyer?
- What specifically is the buyer searching for on the B2B website?
- What are the specific needs of the buyer?
Developing personas is a process that takes time, effort and careful consideration. Without proper formatting, designers and user-experience professionals won’t be able to appreciate the value of personas because they’ll seem too abstract and hard to empathize with.
To ensure that designers and user-experience professionals remember that they are designing for real people from the very beginning, they should follow this series of steps:
Integrate personal attributes into their personas
Details such as demographic information should be part of the persona from inception. This includes a snapshot of who the person or persons the site’s being designed for is. Personal attributes usually include education, gender, age, job description, the company size of the B2B they’re working for and their role of responsibility as far as buying is concerned.
Psychographic information should be included, too. This covers things like the buyer’s motivation, tasks and goals.
Designers and user-experience professionals shouldn’t forget about thinking of a buyer’s “webographics.” This includes details on how long the buyer’s been using the Internet, where he accesses the Internet from, what device he uses, and whether he’s active on social media.
Improve the specificity of personas to make them less impersonal
This piece of advice in particular addresses one of the starkest complaints that designers and user-experience professionals voiced about personas. The less specific a persona is, the more it’s going to come across to designers and user-experience professionals as too abstract.
The way around that is to increase the number of personas you’re working with and move to using primary personas. Primary personas are useful because designers and user-experience professionals can identify with them better than any other persona.
PROTIPPrimary personas are those buyers on your B2B website whose needs have to be met on your user interface before any other persona your company caters to as well.
Maybe that’s CEOs…maybe it’s someone in middle management. Whoever it is, you’ve got to identify the persona with confidence.
Come up with unique scenarios for a persona
You should come up with as many unique scenarios per persona as you can. This is a further, crucial step in empowering designers and user-experience professionals to think about B2B website buyers as more than just abstract users. They’re people who will be subject to specific scenarios based on what they want to accomplish by visiting a B2B website.
For instance, a lead may only be looking for purchase information after finding your site from organic traffic from Google, but an already existing buyer may be looking to buy once again, which means he’ll need a frictionless path to quickly being able to get in touch with salespeople.
During the persona-development process, brainstorming various buyer scenarios can sometimes lead to identifying your primary persona with much greater ease.
Understand how to lay out a persona
Personas can be laid out in one of three ways, depending on the specific situation or client. The “narrative” is the most comprehensive of all personas, providing super-detailed information about the persona, all neatly laid out in chunked paragraphs.
The “table” is a less detailed persona featuring fewer bits of information about the buyer; it’s great for designers and user-experience professionals who want to compare various designs to user needs.
Finally, we have the “quick-and-dirty,” which is nothing more than just a long list of personas, persona pictures, and short descriptions with very little detail about each persona. When designers and user-experience professionals don’t have much information about buyers, this is what they’ll usually put together.
Here are various examples of B2B personas, just for inspiration:
- Human Resources and Personnel Manager B2B Personas
- Marketer B2B Persona
- CMO B2B Persona
- Digital Marketing B2B Persona
Conclusion
It’s a shame that both designers and user-experience professionals currently don’t value these all-important personas as much as they should. Much of it has to do with the fact that personas aren’t introduced properly to them during the design process; another part of it has to simply do with a lack of experience in using personas to begin with.
As we’ve shown in this post, though, personas are integral to your B2B’s whole marketing strategy, so they shouldn’t be taken for granted at all.
When designers and user-experience professionals understand what benefits are derived from using personas from the start of the design process, they can better appreciate how to use them and to use them in the first place.
That’s why it’s helpful to have designers and user-experience professionals brainstorm questions to analyze the users for whom they’re designing. This is the foundation for the entire persona-creation process, which should then follow with the integration of personal attributes, nailing down the specifics of personas, and the creation of scenarios for every persona. Only when all of this has occurred should all of this data be represented in various visual forms, as described above.
How did you go about developing the personas for your company?
How did your design and usability team contribute to that?
What are other ways you can think of to make personas more appealing to designers?
