A persona is a snapshot of user groups, based on a user’s needs, wants, behaviors, expectations, and individual impairments. Personas help your entire team to build empathy towards the end user; it reminds the team of why this product or service even exists.

Identify Your Target

Companies usually have a wide variety of users, each with different experiences, technology backgrounds and abilities. Users can be vastly different across business lines and product offerings. Don’t try to tackle every persona group all at once. Find your focus. Which current and potential users are going to be the best suited for your technology offering?

Any Data is Better Than None

Persona development usually starts with some data and fact-finding mission. This includes usability testing, help desk requests, market or field research and any other qualitative and quantitative data you can find.

Information included in personas range wildly and usually includes user needs, expectations, goals, frustrations, demographics, technology or individual personality traits. After gathering data and identifying any significant trends, segment customers into groups. Usually, each group (persona) is given a fake name; it adds a personal feel to the customer segments and makes them easier to reference.

Sometimes you don’t have any data to leverage. When this happens, make your best guess about who your customers might be. As you’re able to gather more information, iterate and refine your personas regularly.

Put it Together, Give it a Name

Each persona should include unique information, but don’t make each uniquely designed. Choose a structure that you’re able to use across every persona. Personas can take many shapes. A barebones persona might be a sketch or a text document. Other personas involve videos, imagery or well-designed posters. The best format for a persona is the one that is going to be leveraged by the team.

Personas for Chatbots

Personas are a great way to continue building out a delightful user experience for your chatbots. Chatbot users are going to be a subset of your overall user base.

• Think about why they’re using your product or service, but also why they would want to use a chatbot.
• What are their unique needs and frustrations?
• How can they accomplish their goals by leveraging your chatbot?
• What is keeping them from just using a mobile app, website or other interaction?
• Is a chatbot the right fit for your audience?

This is part two of Building a Chatbot series. You can find part one here.

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