UX Central Weekly #9

This week Laura Klein talks about Predictive Personas, an interesting way of looking at what the actual role of personas should be. She says that traditionally we ask “If I interviewed a user, would this persona describe her?” when we should be asking “If I found a person like this, would she become a user?”

A predictive persona is a tool that allows you to validate whether you can accurately identify somebody who will become a customer, which is an incredibly useful thing to be able to do when you’re looking for new users or designing for current ones. If you can create a predictive persona, it means you truly know not just what your users are like, but the exact factors that make it likely that a person will become and remain a happy customer. In theory, personas should let us better understand our real users, spread that knowledge throughout the entire company, and help everybody on the team make smarter, more human-centred product decisions.