User Persona
A User Persona can certainly sound like an intimidating concept.
However, once you understand, it is actually quite simple. User personas are fictional users whose goals and characteristics represent the needs of a larger group of users.
A simple way to explain this is as we are designing websites & marketing material, we must ask ourselves who our specific audience is. For Beacon House Thrift Shop, which user persona will most likely be our customer?
Cassidy
is 32 years old and a stay-at-home mom. She is active on Social Media and enjoys gardening, cooking, sewing, and shopping. She often drops her kids off at school and then goes thrifting to see what kinds of deals she can get.
Michael
is 44 years old, works for Wall Street, and consistently travels worldwide to close business deals. He is not married and has no kids but enjoys long walks on the beach when he has the chance (which isn’t often).
If you guessed that Cassidy is our ideal user persona, then you are correct!
Once you have created your fictional user persona, you can create your website and marketing content as if you are targeting that one individual when you are actually targeting a larger group of similar users.
Let’s take a look at our website, beaconhousethrift.org, and the user personas it was built for.
Now, our website is going to have two ideal users
- The first is someone who is interested in donating items to the Beacon House Thrift Shop. They want to learn how they can drop off, request a pickup, or what items we do and do not accept.
- On our homepage, circled in green, in the top right corner is a button stating “Donate Today”. If the user scrolls down a smidge, they will see “Drop-off Donations” and “Request a Pick-up”. These elements were all placed there for the user who is interested in donating items to Beacon House Thrift Shop.
- The second user is someone who is interested in actually shopping at Beacon House Thrift Shop. They want to learn our locations, hours, and most importantly, what kind of items we sell in our stores.
- A button on our homepage, circled in orange and directly in the center, is stating, “See What’s In Our Stores.” On our navigation menu, the first option is “Find a Store.” These elements were all placed there for the user who is interested in shopping at Beacon House Thrift Shop.
These are just examples of our two primary user personas at Beacon House Thrift Shop.