gavinshearer.com

« We've Got Questions, You've Got Answers | Main | Crunching Numbers »

August 24, 2004

The Importance Of Fake People

Microsoft products are designed for imaginary people.

I know there's an obvious joke here, but I'm serious. We call them "personas." A persona has a first name, an age, a gender, a job, might have kids, might have a spouse (or a divorce), probably drives a car (Mini Cooper?) and could listen to the Cure (this last is true for any persona based on my friend Richard. Dude just left me a long, long voicemail of Robert Smith's latest song).

Marketing people tend to think of the marketplace as a series of segments. An example of a segment might be "all left-handed dentists in the state of Florida" or "Women 18 - 29 who make more than $60,000 a year and have completed a four-year degree." A good segment is one that defines a group of people who have something in common in a way that's useful for target-marketing purposes. An example of this might be, say, people with a preference for buying food that has been grown or produced in an environmentally friendly way (hello, Whole Foods!).

Good software is designed to solve a particular problem for a particular person. Historically, programmers have been very good at creating software that solved problems other programmers were having. However, when it comes to understanding the needs of a particular group of customers, programmers need more than their own experiences and hunches - they need data.

Segmentation data is a good place to start to find common groups of needs, but segments are pretty impersonal (you're just not going to hear someone say, "I bet those left-handed dentists will LOVE the look of this new button!"). Enter personas. Personas take those segments and seek to find traits that are descriptive about the people in them, such as: are they married? Do they have degrees? How old are they? What is their comfort level with computers? Do they like technology, or do they see it as a means to an end?

Once we have this information, we then embellish it with some additional flourishes (e.g., Mini Cooper), find an appropriate photo, and then publicize it to the relevant people (programmers, marketers, etc.) in the company. Suddenly, we're not talking about left-handed dentists; we're asking if "Joe" would like this feature, or of "Betty" would find that new layout too confusing.

I know it sounds hokey, but I have to tell you that I've looked at a lot of personas since coming to Microsoft. In particular, looking over the personas used by the MacBU, I was suddenly hit by the feeling, "Hey! I KNOW that guy!"

Frankly, it was a little bit spooky. But it's also very cool that the company spends as much time and energy as it does to really understand who its customers are and what kinds of needs they have.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at August 24, 2004 5:08 PM. Posted to MSFT.

Comments

Post a comment

« We've Got Questions, You've Got Answers | Main | Crunching Numbers »