Many of our clients want to make their websites more effective – that is, they want site visitors to get what they want more easily. One tool used for this is called “personas.” A persona is a profile of a specific type of site user. Personas are somewhat similar to segments, but they go further: they’re based on the goals of different users when they come to your site. For example, a financial services site might target different segments based on their investable assets. But within those segments, there might be different personas, such as those who are new to investing, those who want great depth of information and those who just want to know what the analysts recommend. Once we uncover the main personas among site users, the site can be designed to address the needs of each of them (and make sure not to alienate any of them).
How do we discover the personas for a given site? Unlike website usability research, where we prefer one-on-one interviews, we’ve found that online bulletin board focus groups work particularly well for persona development. With online bulletin board focus groups, participants log in and answer questions at their convenience over the course of several days. We provide links to various pages on the site being researched and on competitive sites. Participants click on the link, and then the come back to the discussion and answer questions about the perceived value of what they saw, what they liked, what they wish were included, etc. The bulletin board format gives participants the time to answer in depth. And it allows us to get their individual opinions before they see others’ answers, giving us the benefit of the synergy of group discussion without the drawback of a dominator swaying others’ opinions.
The needs and preferences of the different participants tend to cluster in groups, enabling us to develop personas.
Online bulletin board focus groups are not the newest research method out there, and we certainly employ newer methods such as remote webcam focus groups and video diaries, but in many cases, we find that regular, text-based online bulletin board focus groups are very effective (and cost-effective) for a wide variety of research questions, and not just for websites. Some examples: we’ve used them to ask patients what they think of an idea for a new medical device and to get movie-goers across the country to react to movie trailers.
To discuss the best way to answer your research questions, give us a call at (818) 752-7210.