Everybody would like their website to be a success. Still it seems that a lot of websites don’t measure up to the expectations made. In a series of articles I will look at where mistakes are made and give suggestions how a persona can help to make a better and more successful website.
Today in part 1 we will look at what ‘a successful website’ is and how a ‘persona’ can play a role in this. First of all I will briefly explain what a ‘persona’ is.

What are Persona’s?
A persona is a fictitious person which is created based on knowledge of the referred target group and the experience that is gained in other users research. A certain person is created by completing all the attributes such as name, age, sex, family situation, job, hobby’s, and even characteristics. I will come back to this at a later time in this series.

Success
There has been a lot of talk about what exactly determines the success of a website. Many of you would say that this is determined by the website and that purpose the website has. After all, there are many different purposes for a website such as giving information, engaging, branding, networking, generate sales, etc. etc. Besides that there are many other factors named such as number of visitors, position in google, conversion ratios, repeat visits, etc. etc.
But there is something that all the different types of websites have in common and that determine the success of the website and that is the user.

The success of a website is determined by the satisfaction of the users.

The user is exactly that what is easily overlooked in the project. The concept of the internet site and the desired functionality, information and design are usually determined from the organization’s business point of view. With that in mind it is determined how internet can add to these goals. This is a logical and of course a good approach. However this is totally from the organization’s thoughts and that should not be the sole approach.
One other common problem is that the people that are engaged in a project know the organization and all of her aspects so well and are so concerned with the organization. This causes problems when they start thinking from the user’s point of view, because they literally stand in the user’s shoes. They, as users, distance themselves from the organization with all of their knowledge and experience.

Persona’s
This is where persona’s come in the picture. They can make sure that the user actually will be put in and remain as the focal point during the whole project. They can be of great help with discussions on different levels (i.e. political or strategy) that often come from the organization’s tension area. By allowing the persona a different point of view, the discussion will have another viewpoint. This is exactly the viewpoint that could give the project it’s success. Not only does a persona set the user in it’s central point, but has other advantages:

1. Clarity
It does happen that different people that are involved with the project different viewpoints have of the target group. This makes the website discussion easier.

2. Inspiration
Persona’s can serve to inspire; it gives the developers and all involved more the idea to develop for a specific person instead of a whole target group. It makes the target group more realistic.

Before I go any further on how a persona can and must be used, I will show you how we can determine good persona’s.