Now give everyone three stickers. I tend to use dots, since we’re going to do something called dot voting, but anything will do—stars, unicorns, pieces of colored tape, whatever. Each person needs to give a two-minute pitch to the team about who their provisional persona represents and why that’s the right version to focus on for improving the product. Then you vote.
FIGURE 2.6 Review all the personas.
When voting, make sure that people know they’re voting for the persona that most closely resembles someone who would be an actual user of their product. This is the type of user for whom the team will be building and improving the product.
Each person needs to put their stickers on the persona or personas they select. You can put all three stickers on one persona or split them up evenly. If there’s a tie, give everybody else one more sticker and make them vote only on the tied personas (see Figure 2.7).
FIGURE 2.7 Vote for the user you’re building for.
If you like, instead of voting for entire personas, you could have the team vote for specific facts, behaviors, problems, needs, or goals that they think are most important. By the end of this exercise, you should have a single persona for whom you are going to start improving your product.
Why Did You Do That Exercise?
Did you really just generate an accurate vision of your most important user? Well, no. That’s why this is called a provisional persona. What you’ve just done is generate a hypothesis. You’ve made some educated guesses about the person who might use your product or the people who are currently using your product.
Don’t worry, we’ll find out how right (or wrong!) you were later. For now, this is an important first step.
This exercise helps product managers understand how teams see their users. You may have noticed that, unless you’re a team of one, you’re not the only person who makes product decisions. Even if you have the final say, other members of your team, and often people who aren’t even part of the team, are constantly making decisions that can have a tremendous impact on the user experience.
Sometimes, it’s an engineer making a technical trade-off, or a UX designer creating a user flow, or a marketing manager writing ad copy. Everybody on the team occasionally has to make a decision, and the more closely everyone is aligned about who the end user is, the more consistent those decisions will be.
If all of the team members have generated very different pictures of the person they think is using the product, it can be a warning sign that the decisions they make will be wildly inconsistent. It’s a good indication that you need to find ways to include team members in activities that will give them a clearer vision of your real user.
From Provisional to Predictive
You probably made a pretty convincing portrait of a user. I’m sure the persona looks a lot like the people who use your product, or who might use it in the future. But if you want to make your personas really useful, you need to turn them from provisional into predictive.
A predictive persona is a tool that allows you to validate whether you can accurately identify somebody who will become a customer, which is an incredibly useful thing to be able to do when you’re looking for new users or designing for current ones.
To see if your persona is predictive, try recruiting ten people based entirely on the factors you listed in your persona document. You’ll want to screen them pretty strictly to make sure they match.
If you already have a product, try to sell it to the people. Don’t ask them if they’d use it. Actually try to sell it to them. See if they’ll give you a credit card or sign a letter of intent or start the procurement process right there. If your product is free, have them sign up for it and then monitor their account over the next few weeks to see if they continue to use the product. Do whatever you can to turn them into a customer.
If your persona really reflects the needs and goals that cause a person to want to use your product, you should be able to get your research subjects to sign up for and use your products. They should be thrilled to have found you.
On the other hand, if you have the perfect candidate for your product and you can’t sell something to them in person, how will you ever do it when you’re not there to pitch? If hearing about all the benefits of the product from someone who knows exactly how great it is doesn’t convince them, why do you think that a landing page, an app download page, or a Facebook ad will?
Of course, the chances are that you don’t have the perfect candidate for your product. You have a description of some people who currently use your product, or, even worse, a description of a completely imaginary person whom you think should want to use your product.
Until you can identify the specific things that make a person want to be a customer, you don’t have an accurate predictive persona. And that means your product and design decisions will be based on a lie.
As a side note, this also works beautifully with current users and new features. Contact 10 current users and try to sell them a proposed upgrade. Show them a prototype of the upgrade and ask them to pre-order it for a small discount.
Again, you want the majority of them to take you up on the offer or you want to understand which ones do and which ones don’t, because they probably should be represented by different personas.
So what do you do when you find out that none of the people you recruited want your product? You iterate on your persona or your product. Because you’re either wrong about what makes a person use your product, or you’re wrong about what your potential users will buy. You have to change one or the other, and you have to keep doing it until you can prove conclusively that your persona isn’t just descriptive of your users, but also predictive of the type of person who will become a user.
Next Steps
Now that you have your personas, and you’re pretty sure that they’re predictive, you’re ready for the next step—getting out of the building and starting to observe and listen to real humans.
So far, we’ve been mostly talking with team members and stakeholders, because we’ve been very focused on the internal needs and expectations of your company. It’s time to start talking to real users, or, if you’re building a brand new product, potential users.
One of the most important things that the personas can do is to give you somewhere to start with your research. You should constantly be going back to your personas and updating them as you learn new things and build an understanding of the people who are going to buy your product.
But first, you have to find some people and talk to them.
EXERCISE
Identifying Problem Patterns
Once you have an idea of the user whose behavior you want to change, it’s time to learn a few things about that person. The exact things you want