A focus on shared needs.
Our personas differ from the traditional personas used. Our descriptions go beyond demographic data like age, living areas, gender, and education, and we focus on their shared needs. This makes it easier when designing the new situation and prevents unconscious biases.
A guide for your decisions.
Needs-based personas, as we use them, are the next step after researching the need-based tensions at the morphological psychology stage. Each persona gives a lively description of a person that represents (a part of) your target group, although it is completely fictional. We use them as next-level empathy builders in your organisation, because it will give a deep understanding of why customers do the things they do and what they expect from your organisation. For employees, it is often easier to relate to a persona than to a list of requirements.
Creating personas.
Our user research offers us qualitative and quantitative insights into our customers. Creating personas starts by looking for the similarities between people: are they wanting the same thing or are they following the same steps in doing business with you? All these parallels are used to get a deeper understanding of the driving needs your customers have.
The biggest benefit from Need Based Personas.
Sometimes you go the bookstore to get you a book to relax, maybe take it on a holiday. And the next time you’re looking for a book, it has to do with your line of work, wanting to improve your professional skills. Both times it is you, but clearly with a different purpose. Yes you are buying a book, but when taking a closer look there are 2 completely different needs that you’re fulfilling: 1. relaxation and 2. acquiring information and learn.
When just looking at demographics, both times you would be a male/female of a certain age, living either in a city or rural area. With this information, you can only design, for let’s say a woman of 42 living in the city, but there are so many different types of women that fit this profile. Taking a look at all different customer needs and experiences that a bookstore fulfils makes it possible to organise a bookstore to the purpose of people’s visit and using different slogans to attract those with different needs, motivations and emotions.
