Personas: For Coordination's Sake
Posted by Ellie Mirman on Mon, Jan 12, 2009 @ 08:56 AM
In my earlier post, I talked about concreteness - or, more specifically, concreteness as a form of constraints - in helping our minds focus and be more creative.
On a broader level, concreteness has two main benefits vis-a-vis the reception of your ideas:
- Concrete ideas are easier to understand and remember.
- Concrete ideas make it easier for us to coordinate our activities.
I want to skip to the second, less obvious, point: concreteness allows coordination. The idea here is that by not only being specific, but by being concrete, a diverse and otherwise disconnected group of team members are able to rally on one clear and concrete idea.
One example of this that immediately came to mind ist that of buyer personas. Personas are fictious characters created to represent different user types, an archetypal person whom your company may want to reach. Personas allow employees across an organization to visualize and understand who they are marketing or selling to or building a product for. Ask yourself: is it easier to create a marketing campaign to your Uncle Joe who owns his own packaging company, or more generically, a small business owner?
Made to Stick authors Chip and Dan Heath propose the analogy of the mind's memories as velcro - with the more "hooks" (velcro consists of a series of hooks on one side) you have, the stickier the memory. If you picture each detail about your Uncle Joe the small business owner as one of those hooks, it's clear how easy it will be to understand and reference who he is, his preferences, and so on. It's a lot easier to build a product that works for him, create a marketing message that speaks to him, and more effectively sells your product to him - or someone like him.
Photo by andybardill