Personas, Targets and Needs
Available languages: ENG, ITA
Time needed: 4 hours
STS
LI1
LI2
This tool gives the teams the opportunity to focus on their target, first of all, classifying the users, the customers and the enablers. This first analysis could be conducted in different ways but we suggest and introduce the ethnography: the study and systematic recording of human cultures. The study aims at deeply and concretely understanding the problems and the pains of the customers/users. Such level of comprehension will bring to a design of the product/service that really fit with their needs. To produce a very stereotype of the targets it is suggested to create, for each cluster and type of customers/users, a Persona: a card to be filled in that investigates specific aspects of the life and personality of single hypothetical customer/user.
Requirements to make the best out of the material
It is really important that the instructions and guidelines provided by this tool will be followed by concrete activities of analysis, observation and study in real life situations. The teams should dedicate the right time to deeply understand the behaviour of their target “getting out of the building” and meeting user and customer in their environment
How to use this tool
The tool should be used first of all giving the teams an introduction on product/service systems and why it is important to understand the complexity that stands behind them. A system can be considered a mix of products, services, spaces, communicative artefacts, and strategies that offer organic and ethical solutions to complex questions. This complexity must be deeply analyzed and comprehended when it comes to design a product or a service.
So, it is very important to gather insight into how people live, what they do, how they use things or what they need in their everyday or professional lives.
To be able to collect and know such pieces of information teams should interact and relate with their target through observation, interviews, shadowing, focus groups and other techniques rapid ethnography. They must be ready to write down with sufficient reliability a Persona for each of their customer segment.
Expected outcome
Using this tool the teams will start the key process of discovering their customers/users’ needs, problems and behaviours. This analysis will be the base for constructing a value proposition of their business and will be also useful to construct effective validation tests that can arise important insights about what their product/service should provide, contain and offer. The teams, in the end, will have a better understanding of problems, frustrations and aspiration of their users/customers and be ready to start constructing a first viable beta of their product/service.
This tool is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
