In Vital Question #1 we identified and described your ideal customer and created a persona as a useful shorthand and visualisation tool. Now we’ll put that persona to work, answering questions about your website.
Are there any technical needs or limitations your persona would have?
Refer back to the first list you made and think about any specific requirements your persona would need to visit and enjoy your website.
Last time I told you about Karen, who is the persona for this website. I’ll use her as an example!
Karen’s 41 and has reading glasses. She doesn’t want to squint to read tiny print, so the font should be big and black for readability. Her computer’s four years old and a bit slow, so there shouldn’t be too many images and animations or the page would take ages to load.
Outline the content that your persona would want on the website
What kind of information or entertainment is your persona looking for? What problem are they trying to solve? What interesting subject are they looking to learn more about?
Karen’s been thinking about starting a website but she’s worried because she doesn’t really know anything about it and is feeling a little overwhelmed. She wants resources on:
- what she has to do
- which option to choose
- how to avoid wasting money
- how to make money for her business
- how to not sound (or feel) ignorant when she talks to technical people
- how to start
Karen’s busy and doesn’t have time to wander through the website, so the main page needs to be clear and obvious about how we can help her. Our services should be clearly described and priced up front. We need a phone number listed because she doesn’t trust people on the internet if they don’t provide a phone number. She’s thinking about spending a lot of money to get a website designed and that’s a risk, so she’d like some examples of how we can help, and references are reassuring too. She may have come to the website to answer a specific question, so we need to make it easy for her to find the answer. It should have a contact form so she can ask questions. I think she’d really like a glossary of internet terms too. And I’d love it if she wants to suggest other topics to write about, because we both benefit from that, so we need a survey page.
(Notice that we don’t have all of this content yet. There are elements we will build up, and other elements we’ll add as the site gets more complex, like a Start Here link for new readers. Why didn’t we create all of this already? Because it’s too much. We’d still be preparing and testing and invisible a year from now.)
Describe the writing voice that would suit your persona
Your voice is made up of elements like the sentence structure, formality, length and word choice of your writing. Every person has a different style of writing that they prefer: informal, academic, sarcastic, chatty, factual, or whimsical. In fact, many people have multiple styles that they like to read, depending on what role they’re filling at the time. Your voice should suit both your customers and their role. A professional journal for academics will likely have a very different writing style to a blog for football fans, even if they’re both read and enjoyed by the same person. Even if they’re both written by the same person!
Karen would like the website to be friendly and conversational, but informative: like she’s hearing an explanation from her next-door neighbour. Never patronising, just presenting information that she doesn’t yet happen to know. She likes funny, but don’t try too hard! Don’t underplay the time and money required; she’d prefer to know upfront. Don’t pretend it’s not complicated, but make it clear that it can be understood. Use concrete examples and don’t waste her time with useless fluff.
We’ve deliberately broken a convention with style and voice for this website, having ditched the standard business style in favour of conversational and informal. We chose to do this for three reasons:
- Technical subjects are already dry and intimidating and we wanted to make them feel more accessible for non-technical readers
- We both read lots of Kathy Sierra’s work, and we agree that conversational writing kicks formal writing’s ass
- Corporate-speak is boring as batshit to write
Describe what the website should look like to suit your persona’s tastes and needs
Think hard about your persona and what kind of website would appeal to them and be consistent with the previous answers. What colour scheme would they like? How many items should be on the page… should it be crowded and frenetic, or calm and soothing? What experience are they looking to have on your website?
Karen wants a resource that isn’t boring, so a upbeat, slightly unusual colour scheme works best. Let’s use yellow! It’s cheerful, energetic and unafraid, and that’s how we want her to feel on the website. The content should be the star so the rest of the design should be simple and stand out less. Karen doesn’t have a lot of time, so don’t distract her with a thousand links or pictures and make the headings big and colourful so she can skim and see if anything interests her. She should read the content, sign up for the newsletter, talk in the comments, and eventually buy something. All elements should support those actions.
Also, since I’m doing the design (using Headway – that’s an affiliate link) and I’m not a fantastic designer, I’m going to keep everything simple. Luckily Karen will like it clean and simple; if busy and textured suited her better I’d have to hire a designer.
And the first and biggest step is done! Congrats! I know it was a bit of a mind-bender, but I bet you already feel more confident about your website.
Next time, I’ll talk about what people are using your website for!