What’s Driving the Decision to Buy?
A retail giant had a powerful marketing organization, but needed to create tools for their skilled interaction designers so that they could respond more directly to the goals of online shoppers.
MAYA collaborated with their design team to develop personas—archetypal descriptions of real shoppers. Always based on real data, personas describe a task, goal, and mindset that help design teams to keep their work human-centered, minimizing potentially subjective design decisions.
The personas for the retailer were meant to complement and add depth to the extensive demographic data already collected by the their marketing department.
By understanding what drives individual types to buy from the store versus online, the retailer’s internal interaction designers more easily could connect the dots between superior marketing-driven data and superior interaction design.
Personas: Raw data is where the fun starts
MAYA based the personas on real people. To meet them, we traveled to two major cities to conduct 20 structured interviews in their homes. The interview participants talked with us about their lives, families, attitudes, stresses, and joys. Oh yeah, they also talked about shopping. We observed them while they expressed their thinking as they looked at various products online.
These in-home interviews yielded mountains of data in various forms, including video tapes, notes, comments, quotes, online shopping paths, stories, and product recommendations. (You must try the Mister Clean® Magic Eraser®!)
But the findings from these interviews were just the beginning of persona development.
Personas take shape one idea at a time
A project team consisting of three Mayans and two information architects from the retail organization reviewed all the interview data. During an intensive two-day session, we sorted through the data and established affinities (categories of shopping issues). Through this process, we came to know the interview subjects intimately, and from there we began to frame out personas. Each persona started with just one sticky note that characterized an attitude about online shopping.
From there, we did (really) rapid iterations. For two weeks, the personas took shape as we passed drafts of their prosaic content back and forth each day.
Some things are better left unsaid
What do they look like?
While the descriptions of the personas were taking shape, there was a big design challenge to embody them in some form that would make them seem real—make them seem human.
Typically, personas have a name, job, age, income—even a photo. Altogether, these “put a face” behind the tasks and goals driving them. In this situation, though, the retailer needed the personas to be easily integrated with their already extensive demographic and market segmentation data. That meant that the personas needed to seem human without being given faces, ages, or genders.
MAYA solved this design challenge with personas that we:
- named for their attitude (instead of names like Bob or Mary);
- described in the first person (instead of in the third person);
- visualized by silhouettes, i.e., body outlines that played up gesture and body language.
Each persona seemed like a real person, without betraying information that could conflict with market segmentation data.
“Thinking tools for busy designers”
The retailer was thrilled with the personas, which their design teams started using even before the official roll out. As thinking tools, the personas inspired busy designers and gave them the power to make design decisions based on the real goals and mindsets of various types of shoppers.
MAYA delivered several different persona materials, including:
- 5×7 two-sided cards for each persona profile;
- a one-pager with extensive information about each persona;
- audio clips of interview subject statements that drove each persona;
- 4’ cut-outs of the silhouettes to keep around the office;
- a comparison tool for teams to keep inside project binders as a ready reference.
Persona tools are for interaction design
A product in themselves, personas are a tool for interaction designers, giving them a way to form a shared understanding of the user—or the dynamics and differences among many users. They help a design team to make decisions, weigh trade-offs, and keep the design moving in the right direction through multiple iterations and usability tests.