Customer persona and scenario analysis
Creating personasfor typical site visitors is a powerful technique for influencing the
planning of online campaigns and the usability and customer centricity of a web site.
Personas are essentially a ‘thumbnail’ description of a type of person. They have been
used for a long time in research for segmentation and advertising, but in recent years
have also proved effective for improving web site design by companies that have applied
the technique.
Customer scenariosare developed for different personas. Patricia Seybold, in her book
with Ronni Marshak, The Customer Revolution (2001), explains them as follows:
A customer scenario is a set of tasks that a particular customer wants or needs to do in
order to accomplish his or her desired outcome.
You will see that scenarios can be developed for each persona. For an online bank,
scenarios might include:
1 New customer – opening online account
2 Existing customer – transferring an account online
3 Existing customer – finding an additional product.
Each scenario is split up into a series of steps or tasks before the scenario is completed.
These steps can be best thought of as a series of questions a visitor asks. By identifying
questions web site designers identify the different information needs of different cus-
tomer types at different stages in the buying process.
The use of scenarios is a simple, but very powerful, web design technique that is still
relatively rare in web site design. They can also be used when benchmarking competitor
sites as part of situation analysis.
Here are two simple examples of a commercial bank offering business services which
show an experienced user (persona 1) and less experienced user (persona 2).
ONLINE BUYER BEHAVIOUR
Figure 2.22Development of experience in Internet usage
Amount of activity
Time
Fast: simple search
or decisions Medium: research
for complex
decisions
Slow: technically
complex or
financially risky
E-mail;
Search
engines;
Surfing
Research
offline
purchases
e.g. travel, car
Make small low
involvement
purchase
Post to
a forum
Buy at auction
More frequent
higher value
purchases
Sell at auction
Download
software
Visit
government
sites
Favoured
information
source
Frequent
high
involvement
purchases
Personas
A thumbnail summary
of the characteristics,
needs, motivations and
environment of typical
web site users.
Customer scenarios
(user journeys)
Alternative tasks or
outcomes required by a
visitor to a web site.
Typically accomplished
in a series of stages of
different tasks involving
different information
needs or experiences.