Personas

Understanding customer behaviours and motivations

Problem

Every product team needs to understand who they are designing for. Lyst did not have a set of personas to help the product focus on the customer’s context and needs.

My Approach

Who to speak to? The most important thing was finding the right participants and conducting in-depth qualitative research to understand behaviours, motivations and the customer’s context. I worked with the data team to investigate how people were using the Lyst product, drilling down into behaviour data. Using data as well as information from interviews would lead to a more robust understanding of our customers and their behaviours.

I needed to define the types of customers Lyst was already attracting as well as understand from the business who our ideal customer was and why, in terms of business strategy.

Collaboration across the business, I spoke with various teams within the business to document their assumptions about who the Lyst customer was. I spoke with our management team to understand their aspirations for the type of customer we wanted to attract and why this customer was preferred.

Research methods, current and potential customers, I ran intercepts via Ethnio on the Lyst website to recruit and speak to current Lyst customers who exhibited certain behaviours we were interested in. I spoke to these recruited participants in 1 to 1 remote video interviews. I also recruited non Lyst customers via a panel based on shopping behaviours we were interested in because I wanted a comparison group. In all I conducted about 40 interviews.

I collaborated with the data team to get a baseline understanding of behaviours and attributes of current Lyst customers.

First generation of personas, After analysing the themes from the interviews, from both Lyst customers and non customers and using the behaviour data as guide, I created a first generation of personas.

Sense check, For the first version of the personas I presented these to various stakeholders around the business. We used these as discussion points for who the Lyst customer currently was and the type of customer’s we wanted to attract. For each persona I collated behaviours and attitudes which people talked about and we had seen exhibited within behaviour data. After this first round, the marketing team and I felt there was a persona type missing and this was more about dividing one theme from the research into a further two themes. This first sense check also meant that I kept stakeholders informed and I brought them with me through the process of how these personas had been developed.

Second generation of personas, With the addition of the final persona we had a set of 6 personas which helped us to get a better understanding of our customer types, their behaviours, their context and how we could better meet their needs.

Outcome

• The personas were a vital contribution to Lyst’s product development approach.

• They were used within our sprints to think about customer behaviours and needs, then generate product ideas to meet those needs.

• These personas were used to help set up the initial ideas, and they became a tool to help the PM and wider product team focus on the customer’s context.