Know Your Customer
(Continued from introduction)
Switch to outcome personas. To design disruptive digital products customers love, we need to understand how to create customer value. You may be familiar with personas as a means to focus design efforts on specific target customer groups. By switching how we design personas, we focus product design more effectively on outcomes that matter.
Designing personas well requires us to conduct quality research about our target customers. Alas, many digital experience design firms I’ve spoken with tell me their customers consistently underestimate the importance of deep customer research. The assumption of the client is that their existing research on customers is more than sufficient to use for designing a new digital product or experience. Time-consuming customer research is often sacrificed in the name of getting to market faster. Unfortunately, this can result in hundreds of hours poured into designing products based upon bad data.
Introducing Outcome Personas
With outcome personas, each persona represents a distinct set of high-value outcomes which matter to your target customer.
Airline Example
Let’s consider airline customers. For this example, we’ll examine two broad customer groups based on an initial premise for outcomes of value:
Starting Persona for Business Customers: Becky Business
Primary outcome of value: Successful business trip.
Other potential outcomes of value: Connect with friends, eat healthily, exercise, get work done on trip.
Other persona details (these provide the personal info to round out the persona and should be tailored to your market – a sample included here):
Age: 46
Gender: F
Occupation: Business analyst.
Travel for work: 40%
Typical miles per year: 100,000
Business miles: 90%
Personal miles: 10%
Preferred airport arrival buffer before flight departure: 60 mins
Home airport: BOS
Flight selection preferences: (1) best seats (2) shortest total duration (3) lowest cost
Max stops: 0 or 1
Preferred airlines: American / One World
Alternate airlines: Jet Blue, Delta
Preferred seats: Aisle toward front of aircraft, preferred upgrades, then window
Typical luggage load: hand luggage only
Frequent traveler program: Yes, 2m miles
Traveler status 90-day avg: 33678 points
Preferred airport transport: Lyft
Preferred car rental: Avis
Preferred hotel chain: Marriott
Preferred credit card: Citi AAdvantage
Family: married + 2 children
Social media: Twitter, FB, Instagram
Subscriptions: WSJ, HBR, FT
In-flight movies: Comedy, Action, Sci-Fi
In-flight news: BBC, NPR
In-flight games: Wordle
Preferred exercise routine: Run in early AM
…
Starting Persona For Vacation Travelers: Vince Vacation
Primary outcome of value: A relaxing and enjoyable vacation within budget.
Other potential outcomes of value: try new experiences, enjoy dining out, catch some rays. (We can build out a list of persona attributes for Vince similar to the one started for Becky above).
With our draft personas as a starting point, we use qualitative and quantitative research to validate our assumptions and potentially identify other outcomes of equal or more value. This research helps refine our personas and makes sure we’re focused on the things our target customers value.
Once we have our personas defined, we’re ready to move to step two: Create an outcome journey map.
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