Personas

Definition persona: 

A persona is a stereotype of a special group. Alan Cooper develops the persona method (Pruitt & Adlin 2006, p.11). The main idea is to have a stereotype of a person in your mind, which represents a group of your tagged audience. For example you develop an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution for a company and there are different user groups such as secretaries, engineers and controllers. These user groups are very different and you have to think about each group separately to cope with all their needs. In order to do this it is helpful to develop small descriptions of a stereotype of each group. Afterwards it is easy to ask yourself if a solution is a good solution for the secretary and also for the engineer, for instances. 

I developed three personas for my project. These personas should help to understand a possible target audience of my project and should also help me to check if my product is usable for these three types of target audience.

Persona Lilli, Age: 25

Use Pattern: Shopping with friends, is interested in new trends on sales

Demographic Group: Student, single, female, likes to dance 

Favourite Brands: Top Shop, Accessorize, Zara, Mango

Favourite Movie: Twilight

User of these devices: The has an Sony PC and an iPod   

Profile:

Lilli is 25 years old, is German, and lives in Hamburg. She is a student in the course BA Marketing. She is single for 2 month, but It maybe she gets a new boyfriend in the near time. She likes being a student mainly because of the spare time. In this time, she goes out with friends for dancing and talking or she meets friends in the city for shopping. Of course she has not much money as a student, because of this she tries to buy in sales. In order to do that she informs herself about trendy items and whenever possible the items she is buying are on sales.

Persona Christina, Age: 37

Use Pattern: Has to dress up for her job, is interested in trends in a higher price level

Demographic Group: Employee (product manager), has a boyfriend for 10 years, no kids, female, likes to go to nice restaurants

Favourite Brands: Hugo Boss, Comptoir des Cotonniers, Cos

Favourite Movie: Life is Beautiful

User of these devices: Has a Mac Book and an iPhone

Profile:
Christina is 37 years old and French. She lives in London and works for a big company as a product manager. Due to her job, she has to wear nice business outfits. In general, she likes to go shopping, but only when she has time for it and this is seldom in her job. In order to this she tries to buy online. She knows her labels and her sizes. Mostly she buys basics, but sometimes she likes something new, special and individual. She can rarely convince her boyfriend to go shopping with her and he agree when they combine the shopping trip with a walk and a lunch in a nice restaurant.


Persona Steve, Age: 28

Use Pattern: Likes fashion and likes to wear fancy clothes

Demographic Group: Web designer, single/ male, likes travelling

Favourite Brands: Fred Perry, Ben Sherman, Urban Outfitters

Favourite Movie: Brazil

User of these devices: He has a Mac Book Air, Think Pad and an iPad

Profile: Steve is 28, is English, and lives in Berlin. He is a web designer and works as a freelancer. His German is not bad and he has a good network. Hence his every month income is good. Normally he spends his money for travelling and to going out with friends. He also likes, to buy fancy things especially clothes and sneakers. It is important for him to look trendy but individual. This is why, he checks the new trends and tries to find something which is trendy but not too common.

Possible product ideas deduced from the personas:

1. To buy online
2. A section with sale 
3. Local information sale in your area or you can buy this in your area
4. Seasonal trends 
5. Individual suggestion of clothing combinations 

Pruitt, J. & Tamara A., 2006: The Persona Lifecycle. Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.