Best Practices for Developing Personas with the Sitecore Customer

white paper

Best Practices for Developing Personas with the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform

This white paper was developed with additional expertise from VML, a valued Sitecore Partner. www.vml.com

Best Practices for Developing Personas with the Sitecore CEP

Table of Contents Executive Summary

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Introduction

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The Value of Developing and Using Personas

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The Process for Developing Personas Step 1: Research Step 2: Segmenting Personas Step 3: Gathering Data Step 4: Prioritizing Personas Step 5: Making Personas Real

2 2 3 5 6 6

Why You Should Use Personas in Sitecore

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How to Use Personas with Sitecore Step 1: Find Personality Attributes of Your Personas Step 2: Validate the Personality Attributes of your Personas Step 3: Configure the Persona Profile and Profile Keys Step 4: Configure Profile Card Presets Step 5: Profile Content

8 8 9 10 11 14

Closing the Circle

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About VML

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About Sitecore

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About the Author

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Copyright Copyright © 2012 Sitecore. All Rights Reserved. Restricted Rights Legend This document may not, in whole or in part, be photocopied, reproduced, translated, or reduced to any electronic medium or machine readable form without prior consent, in writing, from Sitecore. Information in this document is subject to change without notice and does not represent a commitment on the part of Sitecore. Trademarks Sitecore is a registered trademark of Sitecore. All other company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners.


Executive Summary Personas are essential for designing great user experiences that reflect how real users are using your website. Why is this important? Because designing great user experiences that are relevant for your most important visitors helps you optimize the outcome of your digital channels. In this whitepaper, you’ll learn why you should be using personas instead of basing the user experience on hypotheses, what the process is for developing personas, and how Sitecore can help you measure and optimize the impact of your personas. With Sitecore, you’ll have the tools you need to close the circle on your digital marketing efforts to engage more prospects and customers.

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Introduction Interacting with a website should be like having a real conversation between two people. Unfortunately, your site goals are often not the same as your visitors’ goals, creating a disconnect in the conversation, especially when your content is not relevant to your visitors. The success of your online business depends on satisfying your site visitors. That’s why the visitor experience your website delivers should be based on your audience’s needs. Let knowledge of your audience inform what you build, how it works, what it says, and how it looks to trigger that conversation! Personas are essential to good, user-centered design. Personas are “archetypical” visitors/users of a website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ‘stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and user experience design. Personas identify user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behavior. They also bring users to life with names, personalities, photos and stories that describe who they are and what their needs are. Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. User research is conducted before the personas are created to ensure they accurately represent end users rather than the opinion of the person defining the personas. Once developed, you can make your personas “come to life” in Sitecore, which lets you target, measure and optimize them based on actual site behavior. In this whitepaper, Sitecore teamed up with long-time Sitecore partner VML to share our combined knowledge about building and using personas in everyday practice.

The Value of Developing and Using Personas Personas allow your team to live and breathe your users’ world as if they were a close friend or part of the family. They allow you to remove project team biases and instead focus your team on the behaviors and motivations typical of a broad range of users. Personas enable you to make decisions at a strategic level by matching your site’s focus and purpose to your users’ needs and goals. In short, personas: • Bring focus • Build empathy • Encourage consensus • Create efficiency • Lead to better decisions • Optimize the outcomes of your digital channels

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The Process for Developing Personas Sitecore partner VML has many years of experience in developing personas and recommends utilizing the following five-step process to create effective personas.

Step 1: Research To start developing personas, start by defining the landscape of your user research testing. Figure 1 shows an example of a landscape from both qualitative (insights) and quantitative (validation) perspectives. If your design team cannot easily talk to end users, we recommend you find the person in your organization that has the most knowledge of clients and prospects, assuming those are the users your site should target.

Figure 1. Map of Data Collection Methods for User Research Testing Gather as much information as possible about the types of questions customers and prospects ask. This will give you first-hand insight into the customer/prospect knowledge of the industry and their knowledge of your offering. Use this information as a guide to begin the persona research process. Research a cross-section of online customers, offline customers, non-customers and other audiences. Stakeholder interviews are a critical step in the development of personas. The output of these interviews will be a collection of feature requests, business requirements, current and expected behavior patterns, and identification of gaps with the current product or service as well as an idea of who your personas will ultimately become. Make sure that interviews are informal, loosely structured conversations to get the best output, as well as “between the lines” insight.

Potential Discussion Topics for Interviews: • History with the company • Domain experience and knowledge • Goals and behaviors • Attitudes and motivators • Opportunities

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As a follow up, you could research actual behavior by using field studies and usability tests. Figure 2 summarizes the recommended research approach.

Figure 2. Recommended Research Approach

Step 2: Segmenting Personas Once you have collected all your interview data, you can begin the process of finding stories within the data. To do this effectively, you should segment your findings into three buckets: goals, behaviors and attitudes. Unlike market segments that are used to target segments of consumers, persona segments will help you understand how people actually use your site/product.

Segmentation by Goals Based on your research, determine what people are trying to accomplish when they are on your site. PRIMARY GOALS Be happy – Motivator

NEED

TASK

Understand process

Learn about features

Be independent – Motivator

SECONDARY GOALS Get financing Sell my old car Find the best trade-in offer

Figure 3. Example of Segmentation by Goals

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Segmentation by Behaviors and Attitudes This segment helps you determine how users differ based on what they do or how they think. Behaviors

Attitudes

Frequency of real car buying activity

Knowledge about cars

Frequency of visits to the car sites

Motivators affecting users’ likelihood to buy new or used

Channel usage for various needs

Perception of the company/brand

Use of competitors

Interest in green vehicles

Figure 4. Example of Segmentation by Behaviors and Attitudes Make sure to explore different combinations as in Figure 5. Once you’ve segmented your users, you should test the segments to ensure they adhere to the following guidelines: • Explain key differences you’ve observed among users • Are different enough from each other • Feel like real people • Are described quickly • Cover all users • Clearly affect decision making

Figure 5. Example of Exploring Combinations of Behaviors and Attitudes

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Step 3: Gathering Data Once segmented, your next step is to gather data to validate your segmentation. There are several key types of data you will need to validate personas, including site traffic, survey data, CRM data and user interviews. These sources of data will provide insights and validation to shape your completed personas.

TIP: Incentives and reminders can boost completion rates!

One way to gather data is by using web-based surveys with site intercepts. Make sure to survey a cross-section of users and set a goal of more than 100 completions per segment to obtain statistically significant data. What should be surveyed? Here are some ideas: • Questions to gather data on segmentation attributes

• Previous car buying experiences

• Goal for visiting the site (buy a car, research pricing, etc.)

• Questions to test the segmentation against, like an exit survey

• Frequency of site visits for each possible user goal

• Other behaviors (site/channel usage, feature usage, etc.)

• Importance of each possible goal to the user

• Other attitudes (toward company, about self, etc.)

• User’s self-perception of car expertise

• Knowledge of cars Recommended order of questions in the survey: • Current goals, usage and behavior, including channel usage

• Satisfaction with existing features and content

• History with the site and company

• Psychographic questions

• Use of or importance of existing features and content

• Demographic questions

• Importance of new features and content

In addition to surveys, consider including site traffic analysis by looking at metrics like: • Entry pages

• Search terms

• Referrers

• Conversions

• Exit pages

• Duration

• Common paths

• Frequency

• Feature usage Also consider including CRM data such as: • Annual spending • Frequency of purchase • Products or services purchased • Channel usage • Customer support usage • Length of time as customer

Figure 6. Complete User Portrait

Once you have insight into survey, site and CRM data, you should then have a complete user portrait as in Figure 6.

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Step 4: Prioritizing Personas Personas should be prioritized as one of the following: • Primary: The users of your products/services who are your main focus. The experience will be optimized for them. At least one persona should be a primary persona, but no more than three personas should be designated as primary as this creates greater design complexity. • Secondary: Users who also use your product/services. You will satisfy them whenever you can. • Unimportant: Low-priority users, including infrequent, unauthorized or unskilled users. • Affected: They don’t use your product/services themselves, but are affected by it. • Exclusionary: Someone you’re not designing the experience for. You should get team consensus about the relative priority of the various personas. For instance, it’s often critical to consider which personas are the “neediest” – that is, if you can solve a design problem for them, you solve it for your other important personas. If this is the case, “neediness” should take priority because personas are a design tool, not market segmentation.

Step 5: Making Personas Real To make your personas real, details matter. Name all your personas and have accompanying photos to help humanize them to others. Match personas to market segments, if appropriate, and provide a “back story” that may not be essential for design experience purposes, but helps the persona feel more real. This background information often comes from the marketing team. Use the personas you’ve created to enable your team to live and breathe in your users’ world, and remember users’ needs when building the digital experience. Here are some recommended areas of information that help describe a persona: • Name • Photo • Quote (helps people who use the persona address possible concerns) • Personal information • Profile • Goals • Business objectives • Prioritization of the persona Figure 7 shows an example of a persona for a first-time car buyer.

Figure 7. Example Persona

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Also consider using scenarios with each persona, similar to Figure 8. Once the personas are developed, they should impact the design of the experience, including what type of structure, content and navigation is needed to address the personas’ needs and optimize your outcomes.

Why You Should Use Personas in Sitecore

Figure 8. Example of a Scenario for a Persona

Personas are valuable tools that can be used in a multitude of ways. They can aid in creative and functional design, make sense of research findings, assist in content creation, and help qualify the severity of QA bugs based on the pain points of a particular persona. Using personas, scenarios and task analysis, we can inform feature design of the product/service. Often organizations invest in developing personas, but then don’t continue to use them. The personas are used extensively at first, in design and user experience decisions, to answer questions such as: “How will John navigate our website,” “What content is relevant for John and what is not?” But once those decisions are made and the new website is live, we tend to forget the personas – they are left in the drawer until the next redesign or user experience decision. But wouldn’t it be better if personas were actively used beyond creation of the new website? They could be used to shape insight about the usage of the website. More importantly, personas can be modified and enhanced based on how the site is actually used to further improve and optimize understanding and usage of the personas. With the Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform, you can close the circle. Sitecore enables you to measure and re-evaluate your work. Using Sitecore, you can configure personas and use them to profile content and visitors. This offers two major advantages: 1. Content editors can profile content using personas. The built-in profile viewer in the Sitecore user interface lets them see who they are writing for. The result is more relevant, targeted copy as content editors have a clear picture of the audience. 2. You can track visitor behavior for profiled content. Based on implicit browsing behavior, you can use this insight to: a. Personalize content in real time, according to which personas/visitor groups the visitor is most similar to. b. Measure the impact of content on a Persona level, which can be used to optimize the site experience for that specific persona. c. Validate your personas. You can determine how often the site is used by the different personas. Are there other personas, which you haven’t considered, that use the site heavily?

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With Sitecore, personas come alive and are used actively to create better user experiences and optimize digital outcomes.

How to Use Personas with Sitecore Once you’ve developed your personas and used them to make important design and user experience decisions, then it’s time to put them to further use by putting them into Sitecore. The following is a five-step process for making your developed personas come alive in Sitecore.

Step 1: Find Personality Attributes of Your Personas To configure your personas within Sitecore, you use Profiles. You will need to decide which Profile Keys are needed to describe your developed personas. We strongly recommend that the Profile Keys be personality attributes, which can be used to describe your developed personas. A good practice is to have key stakeholders attend a Profiling Workshop and discuss which personality attributes should be used for the developed personas. Make sure that participants are already familiar with your personas prior to the workshops. You should also have handouts as well as posters of the personas in the room.

For more information about profiling, please refer to the Sitecore guide, “Profiling and Predictive Personalization with Sitecore Customer Engagement Platform,” posted on the Sitecore Partner Network portal.

As an exercise, use large Post-it Notes to identify the correct personality attributes of the personas. Each exercise must have a well-defined objective statement; this well-defined objective statement MUST be posted or written on the wall where everyone can see it. This ensures that everyone has the same focus. When you are trying to find Profile Keys for a persona, the objective statement for the exercise could be: What are the personality attributes of our personas? The following is a suggested process for the exercise: • Give each participant a blank piece of paper; ask them to write down (for example) What are the personality attributes of our personas. Give them five minutes. • Hand out large Post-It notes and ask each participant to write their ideas for personality attributes in BIG, BOLD BLOCK LETTERS, 3 – 5 words on each Post-It. Give them five minutes. • Group participants into smaller groups (e.g. groups of three) and ask them to choose the most important attributes from their Post-Its. Give them five minutes. • Each group puts their most important Post-It on a wall, with a short explanation, then: –– Select the second-most important and pass up –– Pass up the rest –– The discussion is to get allow everyone to understand the attributes

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• Ask all participants to group the remaining Post-Its in pairs of two. Group these on the wall, with roughly five groups of up to two in each. –– Then start adding to groups of two. Note: If you allow groups to be too large at the beginning, it can cause incorrect grouping • Give each group of Post-Its a name, using a symbol • Check for Post-Its that belong in a different group; merge groups; break groups –– Look at groups –– What is missing? –– Get more details • Ask participants for names for the groups and change the symbols to the names –– The names end up in this example to be Profile Keys for a persona profile

Step 2: Validate the Personality Attributes of your Personas Put your identified personality attributes into a matrix with the developed personas (see Table 1). For each of the personas, rank how well each personality attribute defines/impacts the persona, assigning a score of 0 (not at all) to 5 (extremely important). Persona Attribute 1

Attribute 2

Attribute 3

Attribute 4

Attribute 5

Persona 1

1

4

5

5

0

Persona 2

5

3

3

2

2

Persona 3

5

0

1

3

4

Persona 4

5

5

0

0

5

Persona 5

0

0

5

0

5

Table 1. Example of Ranking Matrix for Attributes

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Look for the following to validate the personality attributes: • Attributes that have similar scores across the personas. If there are any, they could most likely be merged • Personas with similar scores across the attributes. If there are any, then double check the scores and if they are still similar, this indicates that you likely need to create an additional personality attribute to distinguish the different personas • Personality attributes having at least one high score across the personas. If not, is that attribute necessary? Once validated, you are ready to configure the personas in Sitecore.

Step 3: Configure the Persona Profile and Profile Keys To configure the persona Profile and Profile Keys, you need to log into the Sitecore desktop and open the Marketing Center. Let’s assume that you are a car manufacturer and the personality attributes of your personas are: • Practical • Cautious • Environmentally Conscious • Boaster First, to create the persona profile, simply select the Profiles folder, right click and insert new Profile. Name it “Persona” and make sure to set the Type to “Sum” (see Figure 9).

Figure 9. Creating a Personal Profile Next you need to configure the Profile Keys, which are the personality attributes. To configure these, right click on the Persona profile you have just created and insert new Profile Key. Name it according to the first personality attribute. Set the MaxValue to the highest value in the scale; in most cases a scale from 0 to 5 will be sufficient, in that case the MaxValue is set to 5.

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Repeat the process for the remaining personality attributes, as shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10. Configuring Profile Keys

Step 4: Configure Profile Card Presets The next step is to configure the presets for the Profile Cards, which are your developed personas. To do that, simply select the folder Profile Cards below the persona profile and click on Insert Profile Card – Persona (see Figure 11).

Figure 11. Configuring Profile Card Presets

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A Profile Card – Persona preset in Sitecore is created with these fields to describe the persona: • Name

• Interests

• Image

• Day of my life

• Title

• Organization

• Details

• Environment

• Age

• Goal

• Description

• Responsibility

• Education

• Psychographics

• Family You may not have text for all the fields above, but we strongly recommend that you use the following fields as a minimum: Name, Image, Title, Details, Age, Description. This will make it easier for your editors to access needed information about the personas. Figure 12 shows an example of a Profile Card – Persona.

Figure 12. Example of a Profile Card – Persona

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The final step in creating the Profile Card – Persona preset is to configure the values attached to the preset. The values are the Profile Keys (personality attributes). Here you can use the matrix from step 2 and simply fill in the values you created for the persona. See Figure 13, where the preset values are configured using Profile Keys.

Figure 13. Configuring Preset Values with Profile Keys Repeat this step for each of the developed personas to configure them in Sitecore. At the Profile Cards level, you can also select whether multiple Profile Cards can be used to profile a Content Item or whether just a single Profile Card is more appropriate. You will use the Authoring Selection option to indicate this. If you determine that multiple cards are applicable, you also have the option to have Sitecore use the same weighting for each card by selecting Multiple, or use custom weighting by selecting Multiple with Percentages (see Figure 14.)

Figure 14. Using Authoring Selection 13


Step 5: Profile Content With the personas configured in Sitecore, you are ready to use them for profiling content. To do that, you can use the Content Editor (or Page Editor), click on the content you would like to profile, and click on the icon for Edit the Profile Cards associated with this item (see Figure 15).

Figure 15. Example of Profiling Content In the pop-up, all the configured profiles are shown. Click on the profile you would like to use for the content item. In our example, we’ve selected the Persona profile (see Figure 16.)

Figure 16. Example of a Profile Card

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Now you are ready to profile the content item. Depending on whether you selected Single or Multiple for the Authoring Selection, different dialogues may appear. Figure 17 shows how a Profile Card – Persona is selected when the Authoring Selection is set to Single. In this example, we have chosen Lynette.

Figure 17. Selecting a Single Profile Card Figure 18 shows how multiple Profile Cards – Personas are selected, when the Authoring Selection is set to Multiple with Percentages. In this example, we have chosen to weight the profiling as 90% for Rolph and 10% for Lynette.

Figure 18. Selecting from Multiple Profile Cards

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Once the content item is profiled, the details of the Profile Card(s) used appear above the content (see Figure 19). This enables a better editorial experience by giving the editors information about who they are writing for. This is also the reason that, at a minimum, you should fill in the recommended fields for each Profile Card.

Figure 19. Details of the Profile Card You have now configured the personas in Sitecore enabling them to be used to profile both content and visitors consuming content on your site.

Closing the Circle Based on how visitors are browsing the site and which profiled content they consume, you can see a real-time visitor profile being built. This visitor profile can help identify which of your personas the visitor is most similar to. Profiling can be used for real-time personalization, which lets you target visitors with relevant messages to optimize their experience and your results. By profiling, you are also starting to build knowledge about a unique visitor’s behavior. This insight can be used for targeting cross-channel activities. For example, you can send newsletters based on behaviors, segmenting your visitors/subscribers to deliver only relevant content to them based on their profile. Profiling your content with personas is also about enabling different, and more qualitative, aspects of analytics. Instead of looking at traditional metrics, segmented by traditional parameters such as goal completion and keywords, you are now able to segment using your profiles to get insights into questions such as: • Which keywords attract Persona A? • Which content is most important for Persona B? • Why is Persona C not converting and where do they drop out?

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These are all examples of insight that can be used to optimize the experience for each persona based on your desired outcome. By making the personas come alive through Sitecore, you are gathering data in real time about each visitor’s behavior. This information can then be used for further qualification of each persona – creating a continuous improvement loop and closing the circle.

About VML Recognized by Advertising Age as one of the top digital marketing agencies in the U.S., VML delivers creative solutions at the intersection of marketing and technology. With more than 900 employees around the globe, VML is headquartered in Kansas City, Missouri, with principal offices in New York, Seattle, London, Milan and Geneva. VML handles national, regional and global agency of record responsibilities, providing enterprise website strategy and development, and emerging media leadership. VML was named a Leader in the Forrester Wave report: US Interactive Agencies — Strategy and Execution. VML engineers best-in-class digital experiences for some of the most respected and recognized brands in the world, including Accenture, Carlson Hotels, Colgate-Palmolive, Dell, English Premier League, Ford, Gatorade, Hill’s Pet Nutrition, Kellogg, Microsoft, Sam’s Club, SAP, Southwest Airlines, Western Union and Xerox. Founded in 1992, VML has been a member of the WPP Group of global communication agencies since 2001. For more information about VML, visit www.vml.com.

About Sitecore Sitecore redefines how organizations engage with audiences, powering compelling experiences that sense and adapt to visitors both online and in-person. Sitecore’s leading Content Management System software is the first to cohesively integrate with marketing automation, intranet portal, e-commerce, web optimization, social media and campaign management technologies. This broad choice of capabilities enable marketing professionals, business stakeholders and information technology teams to rapidly implement, measure and manage a successful website and digital business strategy. Businesses can now easily identify, serve and convert new customers with Sitecore’s Digital Marketing System, part of its encompassing Customer Engagement Platform. Thousands of public and private organizations have created and now manage more than 32,000 dynamic websites with Sitecore including, ATP World Tour, CA Technologies, Colliers International, Comcast, Heineken, Microsoft, Nestlé, Royal Navy, The Knot, TOP-TOY, Visa Europe and Verizon. For more information about Sitecore CMS, visit www.sitecore.net.

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About the Author Lars Birkholm Petersen has 14 years of experience in web content management. He has participated in many different roles – including web development, search engine optimization, project management and business development – in more than 100 different website projects as well as WCMS product development. Today, Lars heads Sitecore Business Optimization Services, helping customers and partners achieve their goals with online business optimization.

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Best Practices for Developing Personas with the Sitecore Customer

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