Customer Personas

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

For simplicity, let us pay attention to two personas, one is the owner of a small business and also administers customer resources and the other consumes actively those resources.

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 web site for her company and does not have much time and money for it. Hiring 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 site running as soon as possible – otherwise she will think it is a waste of time and not worth of further investment. Probably she will improve it later (or ask/hire someone to do it), but now she needs just some site so her possible customers will be able to find all needed information about her services and contact her. She might recognize she will have more visitors if Google gives her site in response for a query, but it is unlikely she understands any of SEO techniques. She may find it useful if the site makes easier to schedule appointments and do some other business routines, though she never thought it might be possible. Samantha may have an assistant or two, who may help her updating a site as well. She probably has a mailbox already (that is at 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

• Create site with some easy-to-use tools
• Maintaining site content (add new page, change text)
• Delegating some part of this work on site 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 a ESL school for teenage children of new coming immigrants 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, etc. 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 may email Emily to the address. Emily is accurate and got appropriate training in all her specific IT functions, but she is afraid of unknown stuff and doesn’t want to screw anything.

Top Scenarios

• Reading/answering email
• Proceed to app to upload a file or put simple text

Needs

• 1-3 apps
• 1 mailbox

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