PERSONA
Since we launched our 1st Version, we received a lot of feedback from users, some of them complained about the courses are too hard, some of them said they're too easy, some of them said they want more orientation training programs. We know we can't serve them all with one product, we didn't address our value proposition clearly, we know we need to improve, but we can't make a decision based on who's voice is stronger than the other side.
It's better getting an answer to the question "Who are the core audience?" in the early stage of strategizing. Creating Personas in the tend to be built more from qualitative data rather than quantitative, while many people mistake analytics data as a way to answer the “Who are the users?” question, data gathered on visitors is limited to basic demographics of people who choose to identify themselves. It’s extremely limited in terms of describing our true audience, their behaviors, and motivations. Therefore, an answer to the question is qualitative in nature, not quantitative.
BS PERSONA
We answer these questions by listing our assumptions about the answers and creating bullshit personas first. Here is the questions we need to answer:
• Who are the early adopters of our product? What are their characteristics?
• Are there different groups of users?
• How are user groups different?
• Is there a particular group that is more important than the other ones?
• Is there a particular group that we want to learn more about? Why?
Methodology
We classified our early adopters by their workout years: Professional/Advanced Level (more than 3 years), Medium Level (more than 10 months, less than 3 years), Rookie Level (less than 10 months).
We guessed and listed their key problems, needs when they workout, then build a few features that we hopefully solve the problem we listed. In this phase, I was trying to be diversity. So, I invited our coach team and product operation team with different workout level to brainstorm with us.
We identified our product are able to address more intangible value to the Rookie level and the Medium level, also based on our backstage data pool, near 65% daily activity users are female, so we try to keep this ratio when recruiting.
We used persona's characteristics and behaviors to create measurable benchmark to help our product operation team identify and recruit people. We decided to interview 5 users with phone call instead of face to face to validate our assumptions.
