Simplify Edition 4: Website Persona

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Who is your website talking to?

Relates to: web design, ux, web usability, internet marketing, project planning, persona

Ensuring that your website communicates the right information to potential customers can be a critical component of your company's success. So who does your website actually talk to? This article explains what personas are, the benefits of using persona mapping, how to develop a persona and how to use a persona in the web design process.

Get inside their heads and understand your audience

The beginning of any website development project should be to determine what types of people will go to your website, what their needs are likely to be, and what their buying behaviours will be. Just as your sales people adapt themselves in real time to pitch to different customer profiles, your website needs to address these personas too. It is important to understand the needs and behaviour of your users.

Develop a persona

To get into the customer's mindset, you develop customer personas that include a problem that your customers might be having if they are looking for your products or services on your website.

Customer personas, unlike customer profiles, are not simply about what demographic groups will be targeted in the current direct mail campaign... they take a customer profile a step further - 'personas' put a name, a face, a life, a personality to a fictional character constructed to focus on motivations and behaviours typical of a broad range of users, while still relating to users as individuals. Persona building considers biographic, geographic, demographic, psychographic background information.

By blending science, usability and marketing principles, personas identify user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour.

Tell your web designer who your customers are

Web designers are creative guys and can create a persona that can be used to make decisions about design, how you market your product or service online and how your website talks to potential customers. Personas allow you to identify and communicate your user's needs efficiently and effectively.

How to develop a persona?

Interview business stakeholders to sketch out your typical primary and secondary target audience.

Look at your competition if they use certain images that appeal to a certain persona.

Breathe life into your persona. Write up a bio, maybe attach a picture and a name.

Build demographics such as age, gender, education, occupation; decision making criteria.

Consider psychographics such as goals, motivation.

Map out webographics such as web experience, usage location, usage platform, typical favourite sites.

Create website usage scenarios, example: Information seeker, new customer, existing customer.

How to use a persona?

Identify the features, functionality and content to develop for on your website.

Make design, layout and functionality decisions when planning a new website.

Allow the web designer to live and breathe the user’s world.

Develop scenarios for website usability testing.

In:fact, did you know?

The average person will spend 8 seconds scanning the front page of a newspaper.

On the web, the average initial page scan only takes 4 seconds.

80% of people who use the internet, use search engines as their primary way to look for information.

Persona building and understanding the needs and behaviour of users is one of the most critical success factors for a website project and should be part of any user-centred website design process.

To radically improve the process of behaviour-based website persona development, Simplicity can help you collect data from actual site visitors to discover their behaviours during a website usability test.

Find out about our website design and internet marketing services, or simply get in touch.

About the author

Elke Bretz is the founder and creative director at Simplicity. She strongly believes in simplifying complex matters, and is passionate about web design, website usability, ux, user-interface design and social media. You can follow her on Twitter to keep up to date on anything that's happening in the creative space. More info about Elke on