When you’re trying to understand the audience of your product, building personas can create insights that can be valuable for your entire team.
A persona is usually a one page summary of your user (type) that explains the type of person that you’re designing and building for. It includes their hopes, fears, dreams and goals so that everyone in the team can learn in an instance about who they are and why they need our help.
To build our first set of personas for one of the websites on the Multisite framework at Laureate Universities, we interviewed 2 international students, one school leaver and three career changers. We’ve labeled these audience segments IS, SL and CC.
We’ve split their goals into 4 forces: personal push, solution magnetism, personal drawbacks and solution anxiety. The personal push dives into what is driving them to study with us on a personal and more general level. We ask: why do you want to study? The study magnetism is trying to figure out what drives them to study with us in particular. We ask: Why do you want to study with us? Then we wonder about what holds them back from chasing this solution. We ask: What is stopping you from studying? Finally, we are curious to know what stops them from coming to us for that solution. We ask: What is stopping you from studying with us?
As part of the interviews, we also asked what their current journey has been like in relation to us. We asked about their experience before, during and after their study.
After we have synthesised their answers, we can see some overall shared answers in relation to their forces diagrams. These can be placed inside a combined forces diagram that will show some real insights into shared goals and sentiments.
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