Persona builder

Bring your personas to life with realistic details to better understand your customers and enhance your marketing strategies.

Once you’ve created and named your persona, it's crucial to ensure it accurately represents your customers. In Out of Dark, you can do this by navigating to the Personas tab and selecting your newly created persona.

You're now in the Persona Builder, which is where things can really get detailed. Begin by hovering your mouse over the Identity Panel on the left side of the screen. Click on the pencil icon to start adding demographic details to your persona. In this section, you will be able to:

• Add a photo: Giving your persona a photo makes it more relatable and memorable, helping team members empathize and better understand its characteristics, behaviors, and needs.

• Edit the persona name: Choosing the right name is crucial, but should you need to change or edit it, you can do that here.

• Give your persona a characteristic quote: Craft a quote that captures your persona’s attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, reflecting their perspective on relevant topics or situations.

  For example, Carrie's quote could be:

  "Creating sustainable fashion is not just a business for me, it's a way of life."

• Describe your persona: Write a concise description of your persona's behaviors, needs, goals, and challenges for a complete understanding of their context and motivations.

  Carrie’s description could look like:

  Carrie is a passionate and driven entrepreneur in her early 30s. She is the owner of DreamCatcher, an online store specializing in sustainable clothing. Her passion for eco-friendly fashion drives her business, where she uses her tech-savviness to engage customers and market products effectively. Always valuing customer feedback, Carrie aims to enhance her store's experience but faces challenges like keeping up with sustainable fashion trends and managing customer expectations in a competitive industry.

• Give your persona an age: Set an age for your persona to aid in understanding their life stage, impacting their behaviors, needs, and choices, adding context and realism.

• Assign them a gender: Give your persona a gender to enhance its detail and realism and help you understand the varied needs and preferences across genders for more tailored marketing, product development, and customer service strategies.

• Designate marital status: Understanding a persona's marital status helps gauge their lifestyle, responsibilities, and choices, aiding in tailoring marketing strategies and product designs to suit varying priorities and constraints of different customer segments.

• Decide where they live: Knowing where your persona lives offers key insights into their lifestyle, behavior, and needs, impacting factors like shopping habits, communication preferences, cultural influences, product accessibility, and optimal times for communication, ultimately enhancing personalization and customer experience.

Once you’ve filled out these key details, your persona will begin taking on a life of its own. The next step is to imbue it with personality traits that make it feel truly realistic and believable.

In the center of the screen, you will see four blocks of personality attributes. For simplicity’s sake, each persona starts with the same initial blocks: Personality, Needs, Knowledge, and Preferences.

Each block on the interface is fully editable allowing you to tailor the title, description, and names of individual traits as you see fit. For example, you might change "Empathetic" to "Compassionate" if it fits better. You can also adjust each trait on a scale from one to five to accurately reflect your persona’s personality. Plus, adding more blocks is simple – just click the "+" button at the bottom of the screen labeled Add Blocks.

If this is your first time, we suggest sticking with the four standard attribute blocks Personality, Needs, Knowledge, and Preferences, since they provide a comprehensive understanding of the persona's character. Here’s a brief description of each block:

1. The Personality block provides a nuanced understanding of the persona's character traits, predicting their behaviors, preferences, and reactions in different situations. Tailoring products, services, and communication strategies to align with their character traits leads to increased engagement and satisfaction.
2. The Needs block helps you understand the persona's key requirements, desires, and motivations. This information can guide you in developing and improving your products, services, and strategies, ensuring they align with what the persona values and seeks.
3. The Knowledge block offers insight into the persona's expertise and understanding in certain areas. This information can help predict their abilities, preferences, and potential challenges they may face.
4. The Preferences block helps you delve into what the persona enjoys or prefers. This information can guide you in creating more personalized and effective strategies in marketing, product development, and customer service.

Carrie’s attribute blocks could look like this:

Understanding these facets of your persona enables you to more effectively cater to their needs and enhance their overall customer experience. Each block is fully customizable, allowing you to tailor them to your specific requirements. However, it's important to maintain consistency across all the blocks. Ensure that the details in each block align and support the overall picture you have of your persona. This coherence is key to creating a realistic and reliable representation that effectively guides your customer interaction strategies.

Fantastic work on developing a comprehensive customer persona! Now, you're all set to dive into the exciting part - using this persona to enhance your customers' experiences. Keep in mind, though, that this is just the starting point. Continuously collecting information and refining your personas is crucial. This ongoing process ensures that your customers always receive the best experience possible, tailored to their evolving needs and preferences. Stay attentive to their feedback and changes in behavior, and let this guide your updates to the persona. This way, you'll always be in tune with what your customers truly want and need.

To learn how to turn ideas for improvement into reality, read about Opportunities and Actions in Out of Dark.