How old are your Personas?
Does your organisation have personas for your users? If so, well done – they're a great way to align a team around real user needs. But before you feel too smug, when was the last time you updated them? If it’s even been 3 years, a lot might have changed. Is your Student persona now using ChatGPT for their essays? Is your Professional persona working from home? Is your Retired persona cooking with YouTube tutorials on their smartphone?
These changes matter because much like the way things in your own life constantly change, so do the goals, motivations, and expectations of your users (key elements that define a persona). You’ve probably just not thought about it because you’ve been too busy keeping up yourself.
We’re entering a new phase of rapid technological change. Look at how quickly Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being utilised, from AI chatbots through to spatial computing advancements in the use of virtual world glasses (from Apples Vision Pro to Ray-Ban’s Meta Smart Glasses) as just a couple examples. Think about the way these new devices are changing how you ‘view’ the world. Yup, I punned there. You’re welcome.
Now while you might think ‘these don’t affect my business’, ‘they won’t change how my users engage with my app / website / campaigns’ … you’d be wrong. They all lead to micro changes in behaviour and expectations from everything we engage with. Expectations for your brand, your service, your touchpoints - are constantly changing. How you ask? Here are a just a few examples to consider:
- Personalisation – increasingly users are expecting content to be customised based on their needs / past usage – but without knowing your users, how can you meet these needs?
- Natural language processing (NLP) - from using Alexa and Siri daily, users are expecting such devices and even virtual assistants, to understand and answer more conversational / colloquial language – does your site speak in your users language? Or are you still using business jargon?
- Enhanced search capabilities – expectation that site search can provide more relevant and context-aware results is increasing – do you know what your users are searching for? What type of related content they’d like to see?
Obviously, these are only a few examples to get you thinking. (Feel free to let us know of the key ones you might have noticed.)
However, we’re not here to tell you to revise your personas just for the sake of it — take a step back and evaluate if there are any triggers / changes (internally / externally) that might mean you need to (other than their age). An obvious one for example would be ‘changes in your business’:
- Have you introduced new products / services - are you sure they meet the needs / goals of your users?
- Has the business changed its strategy – and how are you talking about it? Is it clear to your users? Does it meet their needs?
- Have your competitors changed in some way - this will change your users' expectations of you too! How are you managing such expectations?
- Are you chasing a new audience, or are your user-groups changing organically? Do you know what you need to meet your goals here?
Once you’ve thought through this, and decided it’s time “David’s” persona was more reflective of today's needs, how do you then go about updating your personas? Through user research. Utilise your analytics, run competitor research, conduct user testing but most importantly...talk to your end users. Only then can you determine if minor tweaks or new personas are needed. Then make sure you communicate those changes and fully utilise your beautiful new personas.
So, what are we hinting at here? For you to take a look at who your users are, regularly…update those old personas, dust off the user journey maps, and make sure they (and you) are still relevant.
Get in touch to understand how to learn more about your users and how to create / update your user personas.
