INMA_A01.QXD

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.