Creating Personas A training PPT for CIT 230 BYU Idaho 1 February, 2016 Marc Hyatt

User personas are essentially fictitious characters that represent the various different types of people that visit your website. Personas enable you to experience your website through the eyes of another person, which will somewhat neutralize your subjectivity. Like characters in a movie, personas will be archetypes. What are Personas?

This is my homepage tailored to the personas who are clients

Types of Personas Sally Singlemom -- Sally is a single mom who is 35. For work she manages a customer support team at a healthcare company, and has almost no social life. At work and in her personal life, Sally exhibits a high level of integrity and passion. She believes that it's her mission to create a better world for her children Andy Activist - Andy is in his early 30s and single. He has no children so spends a lot of time with friends who share the same interests. Andy's a software engineer with some disposable income. He's not rich, and believes that money corrupts. He also believes in the power of collective activism.

The following eight steps will better help you to create a set of user personas for your website: How To Create User Personas

STEP 1 Define Your Segments Start with a list of the various different segments that you deal with. Donors, volunteers, activists, cultists, subscribers, inactive members, talkative Facebook fans. STEP 2 Define Demographics Demographics are not personas. It's very difficult to create content that resonates when all you know is their gender and age. Still, you have to start somewhere and demographics is a perfectly fine place to start.  Where do they live?  What gender are they?  What level of education have they achieved?  What is their income?  What is their marital status?  Do they have kids?

STEP 3 Articulate Their Values and Beliefs Next, you'll want to know what their values, opinions, and beliefs are. Knowing this information will give you a handle on what will be going on in their heads when they visit your website.  What are their passions and interests?  What are their dreams and goals?  Are they politically conservative or liberal?  What are their personality characteristics?  What motivates them to share information with others? What's great about social media is that you can get this information simply by visiting social profiles. This gets much easier if you use a service like SmallAct or have social CRM features built into your donor database.

STEP 4 Get Under Their Skin Next, you want to articulate what deeply motivates them on an emotional level. This sounds hard, but once you have demographic and psychographic information, getting under their skin will come natural because guess what! You're a human being too! Start by asking some of these questions:  What's their self-image?  What are their day-to-day worries and goals?  How are they trying to create a meaningful life?  What behaviors are they trying to change? STEP 5 Define The Value They Get From Your Organization Knowing what their beliefs are and what moves them emotionally will enable you to articulate exactly why they would donate to you or volunteer. You'll start to understand the real emotional reasons around why they donate or volunteer.

STEP 6 Give Them a Face and a Name Get a picture from a site like Fotolia or Shutterstock. Give them a name that includes an adjective that describes their personality. STEP 7 Share Your Personas You'll want to share your personas with anyone who has direct contact with your constituents. Ask them who specifically each persona reminds them of and why. Their feedback will confirm that your personas actually reflect the real world.

The process of discussing how these personas will feel, think and behave will give you information that you would never be able to get if you used only your subjectivity to design your site. And that's the real value of personas! Conclusion