Hey, welcome to this video. Uh, we're gonna be talking about buyer  personas or user profiles. Now they are just, they're the same thing,  different words for the same thing. Um, and they are key to every UX project. It's a way of keeping everybody on the same page. So, um, if you don't have things like buyer personas,  then you can have the development thing,  the development guys thinking,  or girls thinking, ah, this is who it's for.

And they're developing for them. Uh, the copywriters thinking it's somebody else. Everybody coming up with their own ideas  of who this thing is for. You might have a general consensus without a clear user  profile, they can go off  and everybody designing  different things for different people. So, uh, bio personas look like this. They are super simple.

They just have basic details about the person. You need to give it a name. I don't know why,  but you gotta give them a physical name just so  that when you're talking about it, um, you're talking about,  um, say some of my, um, user profiles for some  of the courses that I do might be, uh, developer Dave. Okay, developer Dave is, uh, X, Y, and Z,  but for some reason he's gotta be called developer Dave,  or website. Wendy's another one. I don't know why they both have  to have the same first letters.

Okay, you can rock that boat. Um, but you come up with the basic details. Not too much detail. I've seen some user profiles  that are like a full, a four page,  maybe two pages long about their profile. Now you just want what's relevant to your product. You don't wanna know what they've had for breakfast,  unless your product or your website  is about what they have for breakfast.

What car they drive is not that useful  unless your app is for driving, okay? Or racing or it gives some sort of benefit, you know,  and kind of really helps understand the person. So keep it short and simple. Make sure you print them out, you stick them to the walls  around when everybody is okay in the meeting rooms,  in the kitchens that everybody knows  and can be reminded about. What you are there for. You are there for developer Dave and what his interests are.

Now, the most important part  of creating a user profile is actually using  them as a UX designer. I know that they're useful  and I use them and I work to them. It's great to have conversations  and meetings to say, instead of saying,  I don't think you should be using that. I say developer. Dave doesn't really like that. Um, you know, so you can have these kind  of like third party conversations  without getting everybody's backup.

But as a business owner,  I get a little scared of them, okay? Because I want to launch a new product or a new service,  and I want it, I don't want to kind of narrow it down  to the buyer persona in case, um, in case I'm wrong, okay? And I exclude some people. So I want it to be, you know, generic  and I make it maybe a bit too much. Everything for everybody becomes nothing for nobody, okay? So you need to kind of keep it down to, you know,  bring it back to this user profile.

Don't be afraid to change a user profile. If it's not working, test it. If it's not working, adjust it. Adapt it, but don't make them. And then file it away in the drawer  and never use them, okay? Print them off.

Stick them  where people can see them in meeting rooms next  to the developers, near the copywriters. If it's just you put them up in your bedroom, um, just so  that you can, you know, be reminded of your developing for,  uh, you know, developer Dave, or website Wendy, okay? Whoever you decide your, um, user profiles are, okay? And their names that you can have those,  you know, have them up and around. Now, when you're creating a user profile, uh,  you really need to do it as a group. Don't just do it as a UX designer, okay?

Do it in by yourself and then kind of deliver it to them  and say, here's our profiles. They might be right, but they won't  get what's really important. And it's the buy-in from what's called the stakeholders. I hate that word case stakeholders,  but it gets used lots in UX and you need to start using it. And it's the people that have an interest in the,  um, you know, interest in the project. It might be the, the business owner, it might be the CFO.

It might be, uh, you know, um, one of the investors. It might be, it might be the HR manager  because it relates to her or him. So make sure everybody's involved  with making the buyer personas. And because what happens is if you do it by yourself  and deliver it, they can say, Ooh, you know, and,  and it doesn't go well. And that's like, it's your buyer persona. Like, I didn't agree with it,  but if you do it together, I'm gonna give you some rules  and some tips of how to do it together.

But you can imagine if you all put this, um, time  and effort together, it doesn't have to be long,  but you come up with 'em together, then you've all, um,  got an invested interest,  or at least everybody's on the same page. Nobody can say later on, oh, you know, geez,  that bye persona that Dan came up  with really wasn't on the mark. Okay? You want everybody to be working together to build it  so that they've got an interest in it. And when, you know, um, when they're testing it,  they understand it fully and really kind of embrace it. So make sure you do it together  and build it together, even if you are kind  of set off to do it by yourself.

Try and draw everybody back in to build a personas. Now, how many buyer personas should you have? Mm. One or two. Okay? Uh, you don't need five probably.

You definitely don't need 10. I've seen them all. Okay? You just really want to have just enough, okay? To get it really clear. But without having too many conflicting personas,  it doesn't, it's not helpful, okay?

I've tried it, it doesn't work. Where you might have to have,  say three is when you've got a product that has lots of kind  of different people coming from different directions. One example is, I was helping somebody with,  it's like an accounting online kind of SaaS solution for,  yeah, online account accounting. Now, they had very clearly different roles for that. So instead of just different people using it, um, let's say,  let's say, um, like for my business,  I use something called Xero. Now, Xero would have different profiles  because they've got me as the business owner using it.

I need to use a certain amount of tools  and use it for a certain kind of way. Okay? I'm looking at reporting, um,  I'm looking at everything really,  but one of my biggest things is the kind  of like monthly reports, okay? Profit and loss, those sorts of things. Now, somebody else in my business, okay,  that does the bookkeeping,  her role is just producing invoices  and chasing invoices up, okay? So they wanna use the product very  differently from what I want to use.

I wanna use a lot more features,  but I don't want to make the invoices. That's not my, you know, it's not what I want to do. Okay? So, um, there's that,  and then there's uh, say some of my staff,  my staff wanna be using it differently. They use Xero in a way  where all they do is put their receipts in, okay? And just claim expenses.

That's all they wanna use. They use an app, okay? I use the website version. So there's, there's lots of people coming at this bit  of software, lots of different ways. So that's where you might have, you know,  a lot more personas. But say it's a website, um, you know,  often you only need one or two.

And that's what I try and stick to. Now, there's two ways of making personas. You can do it from existing data if you have some,  borrow some data from other industries. Otherwise you might have to, if it's quite new  or quite unique, you might have to, um, you know,  do a best guess and then test that persona  through your user testing process  and kind of refine it as you learn more and get more  and, you know, examine more. So let's go and look at good ways  of getting stuff from existing data. Great.

So let's go through  and see where you can pull information for your persona, uh,  from your existing data. Now, you might be like me  and you might have something like Google Analytics  or Omniture or the Adobe version, okay? Some sort of website tracking software, okay? And for me, the nice thing about it is that,  and maybe you say you're doing work for somebody else,  you could ask for access to this. It's not hard to gain access to share  for somebody to share the data with you. What you can do in, um, come in here under audience, go  to overview and under overview there is a few  little things you can look at.

Demographics is the one you want. Got an overview and you can see easily here. Um, who the, on this current site, okay, who the age groups,  okay, 25 to 34. Um, it's mainly, you know, is it mainly male or female? You can see mine's heavily male  and uh, mainly in this age group here. Um, and what you can do is you can dig a little deeper.

So you can go into age, okay, that's the overview part  and you can start to see  kind of a little bit of a breakdown. And over here, now my tracking over here is not hooked up on  this site here, which is really bad of me. But what happens on other sites that I've got is that, um,  I know for a fact that even though this is 25  to 34 is my highest user, um, I know through other ways,  ways of tracking that actually this 35 to 44, uh,  44 is actually the majority of people that actually pay. So even though it's the third smallest group,  it's actually my most, uh, you know, the people  that actually stay the longest on the site. You can see here a lot longer than these other groups. You can see it's, it's funny, like the 18 to 24,  a lot shorter, longer, okay?

And as the age group gets higher, the average duration,  that means the staying on the site longer. And I know through other ways of tracking  that the transactions are a lot higher. So if you can get access to this,  you can do some nice things and kind of rule out, um,  I don't know, um, um, you know, uh, user a profile  that you might have considered that is like 20  that is just outta university  and needs, you know, to upskill. I know through my training sites that it's, um, you know,  people that are a little bit more mature in my age group  that are happy to pay for good training. So, uh, um, same with gender. Okay.

This is really interesting for me  'cause I run both classroom training and online training. And classroom is complete flip of this. It's mainly about 30% female  and, um, you know, 30% male  that turned up to in class stuff. But in terms of online training, it's mostly mail. Okay? And that's across all the websites that I manage.

So yeah, it really helps me get my personas nice and clear. Under interest is another one good overview. You might be interested in how they get this data. Um, there's things in your browser called cookies  and all the advertising, um, groups track  and try and work out bits. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good. It's accurate enough.

You can see here the most, uh,  you know, my interests,  the most interested in my site here is technophile. Okay, that's really broad. There's some kind of like subgroups over here,  but it's kind of useful. Shutter bugs, okay? 'cause I do kind of photography stuff  and it just, it can, can help kind of inform it  and everything else. Uh, another big one is geo.

Okay? So you, if you're dealing  with languages, that might be important. Mine's not. Mine's all English on this site here. And if I go to location though,  and this is really important. So most of my business  for this site comes from the US a huge amount, 33%  and the next is six from the uk.

Okay? So, but if I go into here, what this really helps me  with my persona is, you know, okay,  it's people English speaking and in America in these states. So California and Texas are my biggest ones. Um, and yeah, it's amazing  what you can, what kind of details. You can go into these things and kind of dive in  and you can start to see, you know, in California,  which cities are the highest ones. So San Francisco, San Jose.

And what that's helped me to do, regardless of like UX  and user profiles, those sorts of things. Really interesting for me. 'cause I do lots of, um,  help online. So I do kind of video, uh, uh, bimonthly, uh, sorry, um,  yeah, monthly, um, sessions where I jump onto YouTube  and do a kind of a, a live chat. And I just make sure my time zones kind  of align to these groups. Okay?

If it was big in the UK it  would be a very different time zone. So anyway, I'm going off on a tangent. Um, another one, behavior, no technology is a useful one. Um, so the main one that I like is mobile. If I got an overview, it's gonna tell me some interesting  stuff about desktop versus mobile versus tablet. So, um, this is a really useful one if you are doing this  persona, um, where, you know,  how are they accessing this site if it is mobile, okay,  say it's flipped around and it's, you know, 80% mobile,  I'd spend a lot more time testing my mobile version.

And in this case, because mine is hugely desktop,  I don't ignore mobile,  but I definitely, it's not my main focus. Mainly people are using my site  and interacting with my content,  80% of them through desktop. So that's where I, my kind of first point call is  and my, when I'm designing, I design desktop first instead  of mobile first, which a lot of people, uh,  like at the moment, um, if you're doing with apps,  it's gonna be obviously different. Um, yeah, everything else in there, there's little bits  and pieces, but that's, that's the big stuff. Now, in terms of other existing data, you can go PayScale,  we looked at this earlier, but, um, if you have a profile  and you've decided it's, um, you know, uh,  you profile is a woman, she's in communications,  she's mid-level, she's this, that and the other. What you can do is you can go in here  and figure out what kind of salary she's at.

So it helps you kind of inform, you know,  whether she has disposable income,  what kind of pay scale they're on. You might be thinking one thing, you think, oh yeah,  they earn heaps, but then you actually go off  and find out that they don't okay. Or they do. So use pay is a nice one. Um, another thing you can do is a YouTube. So check that.

Um, if it's yours  or whether you are working for a client,  ask if you can access to their, um, YouTube,  even if you just give you screenshots, okay? They don't have to give you super access. Um, but if I look at this one here,  this is my YouTube channel  and under analytics down here, okay, there's, it's similar  to, um, analytics that we just saw  before from Google Analytics. YouTube one here has some slight different stuff. So this is the people using the content on my site. I give away a lot of free stuff.

Uh,  and um, the things I'm looking for is overview. I'm looking for demographics again. Okay? And you can start to see 25 to 34, okay? It's a different kind of skew in terms of the numbers  of people watching the videos, okay, but similar. Um, and male to female, a lot more male, a lot less female.

And yeah, uh, you can dig in a little bit deeper  so you can view the gender and, uh,  what else your age. Okay? Um, you can dig into these guys here to see. That's my biggest age group. You can start to see as part of that age group who they are. There's, there's a little bits of extra details in here  and this one here is quite nice.

Geography, okay? United States is huge, India is huge here,  but did you notice that on my content, on my site,  it's actually from the uk Okay. Was my second biggest one. UK is fourth down here. So it kind of, you gotta kind of aggregate this type  of information, um, to try and work out your user profiles. And the last thing you can do is surveys.

Now I run surveys regularly. When I say regularly, every time I need  to ask a question, I'll send a survey. So if you are part of this  course, you'll probably get a survey. Um, sooner or later,  I'll probably do it once a month or every two months. And, um, what it allows me to do,  SurveyMonkey is a great free tool. I use this one.

Um, it gives you everything you need mostly,  as long as your numbers are not too low,  like I don't have a huge amount of people to email. So it's, it's, it's free. What it helps me do is it helps the people  that, you know, fill out the servers. I ask questions about who they are, what they do,  what they like about the site, what they like more. And it helps me, you know, get that kind  of user profile nice and tight  and I get an understanding of it. Now there's, there's a whole science to asking kind  of these survey questions to go off, do some research,  send out a SurveyMonkey to the people  that you might have access to.

They might be signed up to a newsletter  or you might grab, you know, you might ask  for from the client, um, to be able to send an email  to the last, you know, the last month's transactions, okay? Um, to see if you can get some  feedback for your user profile. Alright? One of the last things you can do for looking  for existing data, if you don't have any kinda specific  stuff, um, about your users, like I've got, for some  of mine, I've got analytics  and I've got, uh, YouTube is, you can go  to things like the census or you can go  to industry groups quite often. They'll sell you, um, you know, um, traits  and kind of like reports about a certain industry. So you can go and do those ones  and get a more generic look at it.

Um, and if you don't, if you can't find anything, you know,  in there that's useful, just make it up, okay? Make some good assumptions and then test them. So come up with a user profile based on best guess,  and then go through the design and testing loop  and then start to see who are the people that are engaging  with it when you get your first few clients as well. Go through and maybe adjust your user profile  and just keep everybody up to date. Um, you know, with where you're at. And especially at the beginning when you haven't got a  really clear pictures, it's gonna be a bit of a fluid thing  until you get a bit more of a solid understanding of  who your users are.