Web Design – Persona Profiles
You want as many visitors as possible don’t you?
You know what – maybe you don’t!
What you really want are targeted visitors who want your product or service, not people who arrive at your site and vanish immediately.
Quality of web site visitors – not quantity!
This may not seem entirely logical – surely the more people who visit, the more you will sell? – not necessarily.
If you are selling widgets, we could no doubt optimise your site for “XXX”, “Free Porn” and the like. You may well receive truck loads of traffic, but how many of your visitors will buy a widget – very few, as that is not what they are looking for!
Persona Profiling
If we know however that your widgets appeal to middle aged men who drive fast cars and like football, we have a much better chance of making a sale if we reach these men …
Identifying said men is the process we call Persona Profiling. The objective of Persona Profiling is to arrive at a set of potential users of your website where you “know” them. By “knowing” them we mean that you have properly identified their characteristics:
- what are their behaviours and habits?
- how do they buy?
- are they price sensitive?
- do they focus on brands? etc ….
Once we have identified the behaviour and habits of your online audience, we can measure your site’s ability to deliver against these if you already have a site, or we can make sure the site is designed properly if it is a new site.
User Journeys
After we have defined a set of personas, we can create user journeys that map out the steps a user takes to qualify their search requirements – be that a purchase, a customer service enquiry or reassurance.
We can also come up with a good idea of the type of content these visitors will expect to see – the next step is the creation of this content.
The key objective is to ensure that your site meets the needs of your users – “knowing” your users through persona profiling is a big step towards meeting this objective – it is also good fun!