Читать книгу Build Better Products - Laura Klein - Страница 48

You probably made a pretty convincing portrait of a user. I’m sure the persona looks a lot like the people who use your product, or who might use it in the future. But if you want to make your personas really useful, you need to turn them from provisional into predictive.

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.

To see if your persona is predictive, try recruiting ten people based entirely on the factors you listed in your persona document. You’ll want to screen them pretty strictly to make sure they match.

If you already have a product, try to sell it to the people. Don’t ask them if they’d use it. Actually try to sell it to them. See if they’ll give you a credit card or sign a letter of intent or start the procurement process right there. If your product is free, have them sign up for it and then monitor their account over the next few weeks to see if they continue to use the product. Do whatever you can to turn them into a customer.

If your persona really reflects the needs and goals that cause a person to want to use your product, you should be able to get your research subjects to sign up for and use your products. They should be thrilled to have found you.

On the other hand, if you have the perfect candidate for your product and you can’t sell something to them in person, how will you ever do it when you’re not there to pitch? If hearing about all the benefits of the product from someone who knows exactly how great it is doesn’t convince them, why do you think that a landing page, an app download page, or a Facebook ad will?

Of course, the chances are that you don’t have the perfect candidate for your product. You have a description of some people who currently use your product, or, even worse, a description of a completely imaginary person whom you think should want to use your product.

Until you can identify the specific things that make a person want to be a customer, you don’t have an accurate predictive persona. And that means your product and design decisions will be based on a lie.

As a side note, this also works beautifully with current users and new features. Contact 10 current users and try to sell them a proposed upgrade. Show them a prototype of the upgrade and ask them to pre-order it for a small discount.

Again, you want the majority of them to take you up on the offer or you want to understand which ones do and which ones don’t, because they probably should be represented by different personas.

So what do you do when you find out that none of the people you recruited want your product? You iterate on your persona or your product. Because you’re either wrong about what makes a person use your product, or you’re wrong about what your potential users will buy. You have to change one or the other, and you have to keep doing it until you can prove conclusively that your persona isn’t just descriptive of your users, but also predictive of the type of person who will become a user.