Customer Personas

In user experience (UX) design, personas are fictional characters representing different user groups (types) in the UX environment. They put a personal human face on otherwise abstract data about customers.

For simplicity, we will focus on two personas. One is the owner of a small business and also administers customer resources, the other consumes those resources actively.

Samantha - SOHO Owner

Persona

Description

Samantha owns a small health care business. She is quite busy. She isn’t experienced in IT and doesn’t have much time to learn. She wants to have a web site for her company and does not have much time or money for it. Hiring a web design studio or IT consultant is not affordable, so she has to create a simple site herself. The main thing for her now is to make the site run as soon as possible – otherwise she will think it is a waste of time and not worth further investment. She will probably improve it later (or hire someone to do that), but for now she needs a site so her potential customers will be able to find information about her services and contact her. She might recognize she will have more visitors if Google gives her site in a response for a query, but it is unlikely she understands any of SEO techniques. Samantha may find it useful if the site makes easier to schedule appointments and do some other business activities, though she does not know if it is possible. She may have an assistant or two who may help her update the site. She probably has a mailbox already (Gmail) and will appreciate it branded under her site name, as it looks more professional. She may consider an additional or new mail service if equally convenient.

Top Scenarios

• Creating a site with some easy-to-use tools

• Maintaining site content (add new page, change text)

• Delegating part of this work to her staff

Needs

• 1 Website

• 1-2 Applications (Sitebuilder; Accounting)

• 1-4 Mailboxes

• 1-4 Users (assistants)

Emily - SOHO Employee

Persona

Description

Emily is one of 20 teachers in an ESL school for teenage children of new immigrant families in Canada. Her job and interests are generally far from IT, however she is generally comfortable with MS Office documents and her email, which are mainly used to communicate education plans and such. The school gives Emily an email address and account in their privately developed app where she can publish some collateral papers for students. Students and school administration can email Emily to that address. Emily is careful and got the appropriate training in all her specific IT functions, but she is afraid of unknown IT things and does not want to make a mistake.

Top Scenarios

• Reading and answering email

• Proceeding to applications to upload a file or enter simple text

Needs

• 1-3 apps

• 1 mailbox

← APS Resource Model

Customer Scenarios →