Personas

The Role of the Persona is Shifting

I have been a proponent of using Personas to assist in the design of digital interfaces since 2003. I still believe in them, but I think their role has shifted and has perhaps become a bit diminished. Personas are user archetypes, models of groups of users that help define features, requirements and messaging choices. They are invaluable. If you develop digital interfaces and you don’t use Personas, you are seriously behind most everyone.

The Persona’s rival has taken the stage and it’s the real customer. Voice of the customer tools have improved over the last few years and companies pay more attention to what customers say thanks to the rise of social media. Everyday I sit at the breakfast table and read yesterday’s voice of the customer stream that was written by customers directly on our web site. It’s sent to me via email unfiltered, except for blocking out any characters that appear to be account numbers or personal information. Then I navigate to our Facebook brand page and read that, then over to our Twitter stream and read that.

We have done a lot to shape and enrich our Personas over the years, by enhancing their stories and adding other attributes in an attempt to bring them to life and therefore more approachable for business partners. But still they are cardboard cutouts. It’s much more powerful to read words from your customer or see someone’s Avatar adjacent to their feedback.

Reading customer comments evokes a roller coaster of emotions. One comment is glowing with praise that brings a smile to my face and a sense of pride. The next one calls out something that is just, well, stupid of us. We take all these comments seriously, logging them, and then trying to evaluate where in the priority fix queue they should fall. It’s a real time customer focus group and it’s beginning to influence how I design and shape project work almost as much as Personas have done in the past.

Curious if others are having the same experience or have other opinions.

Images from Avizor and Meetin’Bytes

Does the Internet See the REAL Me?

Privacy and identity are lightning rods when you talk about the Internet. Many of us are social animals and are apparently somewhat fearless when it comes to using the web to share, gather and communicate. Our polar opposites wouldn’t go anywhere near anything as risky as that, fearing others will find out too much and use it to harm them. I make no judgements. It’s a purely personal choice people will make.

When we meet people we instantly begin to process who they are based on what we know and our prior experiences. These vary depending on if we are having a phone conversation, an in person meeting, or an e-mail exchange. But what if all we could get was their digital fingerprint? I’ve occasionally wondered how I would be characterized if there was a sophisticated program capable of searching the web based on the slightest of clues, like my name, and assemble what was found into a “digital characterization.” Well the wait is over. At least the first phase of it. MIT has been working on just such a project called Personas. Here is how they describe the project’s philosophy.

In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

Here’s their rundown on how it works.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

Of course anyone who visits the site will immediately put in their own name, quickly followed by others. Perhaps friends, co-workers, family, famous people. It’s fascinating experiment. After typing in my name and kicking off the system you get a building persona series of pages. This is mine about half way through.

Characterizing Steve A Furman — Click image to enlarge

This is my final characterization.

Steve A Furman MIT Persona — Click image to enlarge

How did it do? Surprisingly well. It got the major attributes spot on.

Online
Management
Movies
Social

I don’t have the data dictionary, so I can’t decipher it exactly. I wonder what’s included in aggression and illegal? Since they are probably not scouring content behind sites that require log-ins (my assumption), like Facebook, lots of information is missing. The result ranks family well down the list, but a large part of my Facebook content is family related. Not perfect, and not trying to be. An evolving experiment on the ever growing digital trail.

Try it yourself here.

Sizing your Social Media Audience

Forrester Research publishes and tracks a social engagement “Ladder of Participation.” It’s a framework, based on consumer research, for categorizing users of Social Media by activity and age. This construct has some longevity and I would recommend you spend some time with it. But companies already have their own ways to segment customers or identify prospects. Introducing new thinking on this front will be confusing and getting traction will be slow. Marketing teams have their own sacred segments and chances are your E-Business team has created design Personas. How will the marketing teams make sense of all these segments? This is typical in large firms that have sophisticated marketing departments.

The bottom line is that all marketers need to have a clear picture in their minds of the customer. Not just a cold, calculates segment, but a real person. Here is one approach to solving that problem.

Field a comprehensive research study for both your customers and prospects to learn your brand drivers – what consumers deem as most important and what they are aware of
Create segments from that data as a singular exercise
Overlay your design Personas on that segmentation. If you’ve done a good job creating your Personas this will probably be a 75% match
Tweak the Persona descriptions to fill in the gaps and arrive at a one for one match. By the way if your Personas are over 3 years old, you have to start all over. Having Social Media and online brand attributes written into your Persona biographies is critical. Also things like what handset they use and how they use phone app technology, etc.
The research segments should be the base, but the Personas will bring it to life for the marketing teams. The E-Business and Research teams should collaborate closely on this
Overlay the Forrester participation ladder label to each of these segments
Run the numbers for all these overlays and you’ve got the population/opportunity for all your segments for customers on book
Define and set flags for each of these segments that you can use for your CRM, online, IVR, call center, e-mail, web targeting, etc. This will help with consistency
Inform your reporting and analysis teams of this shift
Your prospect population is also critical. Find a way to use this scheme to reach potential customers. Paid search targeted ad networks, etc.
Create a strategy/approach for how to engage each of these (include social tools) and you’re on your way
Before you finish with this “churn and burn” revisit your Social Media strategy. It’s about the objectives, not the technology.

Business Week has an innovative data section on their site. This one takes the Forrester ladder of social participation and makes it look like a Wired Magazine chart.

Social Media Ladder of Participation

Would love to hear from anyone who is doing or has done this, or has a variation on the theme. Thanks Business Week magazine.

NeuroMarketing – New Tools For Engaging Customers

Fast forward to some time in the future. The marketing game has completely changed, having evolved beyond test and control, research, etc. Imagine you can understand how your customers react to your products. By react I mean physical responses such as eye movements, heart rate, breathing pace, galvanic skin response and body language. You can map these responses to human emotions and cognitive thinking styles. Next you capture how your customers form relationships with your products (abstract, concrete) and how their social preferences interplay with and drive consideration. But wait there’s more. Throw ideolgical values (taste, morals) into the calculus and you will be able to mold a product that satisfies all basic human pleasures and by definition is the most desireable item on the market. You are are flying, and instantly promoted.

Science fiction? Is it even possible? It is possible, and the technology is available now. Welcome to Part III in my weblog series from the Forrester Marketing Forum 2008 (Los Angeles, April 7-9). The Forum’s theme was customer engagement. In this installment I make an attempt to summarize and connect four separate presentations (two breakouts and two keynotes), that starts to show marketers how to create more engaging online experiences by making them more pleasurable and deisrable.

At the heart of this task is a new type of practice called NeuroMarketing. It’s in very early days, having been largely confined to labs using expensive equipment that was uncomfortable for the subjects. As with any technology, it’s getting smaller and cheaper. There is only so far marketers can go with our current practices. In my view it’s critical to employ new tools that can measure human response and desire. Let’s get started.

First – The Four Pleasures Framework by Patrick Jordan. Mr. Jordan is a design, marketing and brand strategist and holds a PhD in psychology. He has worked with major brands to create campaigns and products using his pleasures framework.

The objective is to help people feel good about your product, your brand/company and about themselves. The four pleasures are:

Physio – Physiological, the body and its senses
Psycho – Psychological, the mind, emotions, cognition and interests
Socio – Relationships, social connections in the abstract and concrete
Ideo – Ideological, the values, taste and morals

During his talk Mr. Jordan cited real-life examples for each of the pleasures. To illustrate physio, he spoke about how the car maker Fiat has an entire lab and team devoted to only three parts of a car. The steering wheel, gear shift and inside door handles. Through research and observation, Fiat discovered that these were the first three things a customer actually touched when in a car showroom. The salesman would usually open the door, the customer would step in, put her hands on the wheel, then on the gear shift. When she wanted to exit she would have to touch the door handle. If the designers could elevate the sensory experience of these physical parts to one of pleasure, product consideratin is off to a flying start.

He provided examples for each pleasure, but I won’t go into them here. For those explorers that want to give it a try, he offered this brief summary.

Create robust personas
Conduct indepth ethnographic research
Immerse yourself in your customers
Look at what’s going on in the media

Second – Amplifying Engagement: Measuring Customer’s Emotional Reaction to an Experience, was given by Jeremi Karnell, President, One-to-One Interactive. His company(s) are working in the NeuroMarketing space, and he defines it this way.

NeuroMarketing is a new field of marketing that studies consumers sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.

He discussed what he calls the mind-body nexus of engagement, consisting of perception, attention, brain function and behavior. His firm developed the Quantemo Engagement Index, a scientific approach to measuring a target audience’s emotional reactions to digital media. In short, they put sensors on subjects (simple things like bands, nothing sticks to the skin) show them web sites, ads, emails, then report on heart rate, galvanic skin response and breathing. The sensors can also detect eye tracking and body movement. Are the subjects leaning in (interested), or sitting back (bored). These measurements are graphed and presented alongside the usability testing video and reports to give designers more data points to validate or refine designs or marketing messages. Can be employed against your competitors sites as well.

Third – Creating Personas that Support Engagement was given jointly by Neil Clemmons of Critical Mass and Mike Madaio from QVC. I won’t go into defining personas or how to use them in this post. You can easily find that through a simple search. The value in this talk was how Critical Mass extended the Forrester useful, usable, desireable usability model by adding sustainable and social to the persona matrix.

I have been doing a lot of thinking along these lines lately, and this really made it clear. The more offline experiences migrate to the online world, the more tools designers and marketers will need to be effective. The rapid growth of social computing is being accelerated by technology advances. This will require new ways to think about how to create online experiences that will keep up. Expanding the persona/user-centered design paradigm is a natural next step. Mastering these techniques will be critical to engaging users in your online properties.

Fourth – Designing for Engagement by Forrester Principal Analyst, Kerry Bodine. Her talk orbited around desirability. She didn’t offer a textbook definition, but instead quoted Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio (1964) as he attempted to define obscenity.

I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it…

I know it when I see it. Clearly desirability is a subjective call and as unique as humans. But like so many other things the mind processes, it’s real. That’s why NeuroMarketing is going to be important. It pulls the subjective, which is very difficult for marketers to deal with, into focus using something more concrete than a gut feeling.

Kerry Bodine – Photo: Steve A. Furman

Ms. Bodine showed the standard usability strata Forrester has been promoting for years, and suggested it should look more like a point to point map, increasing the role desirability should play when designing. This is a subtle change, but one that challenges designers and web architects to think about desirability along side the other dimensions at the outset, vs. something to aspire to after launch. Makes more sense.

I would love to see Forrester refine, actually update, their persona framework to address the rise in social computing and match what they have done with this change. Since 2002, I have worked with Cooper to create the personas we use today. Their persona philosophy and methodology was a natural fit with how we think about segmentation.

Ms. Bodine used a number of personal and observed examples of desirable experiences. One as mundane as ordering room service in a hotel. Her summary and advice to marketers was as follows.

Learn to recognize desirability when you see it
Give desirability the recognition it deserves
Find a way to create desirable experiences

My take on what it means

Online marketers (DM guys and product managers) need to get much closer to interactive design than they are today. The pure plays are way ahead of the analog legacy firms (less baggage). Traditional direct marketers have the luxury of creating dozens (sometimes hundreds) of test cells and corresponding creatives. But they do this, for the most part, not so much through observing human responses, but by mechanical test and control (trial and error). I’m not suggesting that this is not a valid science, but it leaves out the human emotional reactions that are hallmark to the web’s interactivity.

Online testing tools available to raise interactive marketing practice to DM levels are getting better, but most firms don’t have the understanding, budget, expertise or technology infrastructure to acquire, implement and use them. They cannot support a network of sites or instances of sites or even regions on pages necessary to conduct robust DM-like testing. Don’t get me wrong, some firms are doing this well, but they are the exception. In my company we had at one time over 14,000 direct marketing test cells for one product! Nothing even close to that online.

I know it’s counterintuitive, but the online channel in most companies is fairly static because of tracking challenges, staff support, lack of a content management system and the reality of having to integrate with back end databases and systems real time. Content management suites like Interwoven, are helping, but they are big enterprise solutions. Could there be an Interwoven Lite market out there?

NeuroMarketing, is real today and could be baked into the normal project plan without extending the time line or breaking the budget. It can give the online marketer a new and powerful tool that doesn’t result in an extra large IT project.

What do you tell your CMO when asked to explain desirability? “I know it when I see it” is probably not going to do it. Use the mind. Neurons tell the truth.

In Summary

Create personas now. If you already have them be sure they are up to date.
Get buy in on personas from your DM marketers and Product Managers.
Bring them into the design and development process early and keep them there through the validation cycles.
Integrate NeuroMarketing techniques in your usability testing plan.

Read my other Forrester Marketing Forum 2008 posts here for Part I and here for Part II.