Behavioral Persona Development: A Crash Course

As the New Year begins, Key Lime Interactive has been beginning the stages of performing regularly scheduled maintenance on the behavioral personas that have been developed for various clients. As tablet use increases across all industries, we’re finding that we’re expanding personas more and more to include on-the-go context. The goal: When our clients are around the figurative design table they can refer to “Sam the Skeptic” and all relevant parties from marketing to product development can understand the target and make decisions to meet that targets defined need.

illustration of a person and what they like and love to understand the behaviors of the consumer What are behavioral personas and does your company need to spend time defining them? This is were Behavioral Persona Development A Crash Course comes in. Traditional personas attempt to humanize your users and place them into segments. They allow you to empathize with who they are as a person and encourage you to develop ways to meet those personal needs. Behavioral personas, however, take this a step deeper; they focus not only on the person and their life, work, motivators, emotional drivers, etc. but they provide insight to typical behaviors and context for the use of your product. When KLI creates behavioral personals the results include experience goals and end goals; ultimately a cohesive meaningful set of identities paired with use cases/scenarios that help your product teams make relevant and appropriate design decisions.

We’ve recognized through the development of our own persona protocol, that the more exposure a given team has to users using products as they prefer and find functional, the better the design iterations become. As we conduct this maintenance and development with clients, we work to include a broad cross section of the client’s team in the persona building process so that internal teams recognize their role and importance in pulling these identities together. In our “crash course” talk that we’ve been giving at various events these past several months, we highlight the steps taken to speak to stakeholders, to of course interview end-users and to validate the results across a large sample of your consumer base. Validation becomes a desirable and unique part of persona building that not only provides that extra layer of confidence about the strength and integrity of the developed personas but it also begins the conversation about the various contextual use cases that emerge for a given product.

All are encouraged to contact us to learn more about KLI’s Behavioral Persona development or to receive a “Behavioral Persona Development: A Crash Course” instructed by KLI’s founder, Ania Rodriguez.