Introduction and session overview Hello everyone. I’m Ursulan Sajjit, your host for this session. And first of all, before moving forward to our next session, I should give kudos to Muis for hosting it. Such an amazing activity that our audience really liked as much as I did, I’m sure. So talking about the session and and kind of talk about the session before I talk about this the wonderful speaker and the amazing person that we have to conduct this. We have Bob Bog with us who has years and years of experience doing digital strategy improving improving user experience and conversion optimization for numerous digital brands across the globe. So, and today for this session, Paul is going to talk about how we can leverage AI to create user personas that are generally going to help you with improve user journey to improve user journeys and conversion optimizations. So, without further ado, let’s welcome Paul to our session. Hello Paul, how are you? I am very well. And yourself? You doing all right? I’m good. You’re at the beginning of your session, so you’re not too tired yet, but wait until you finish. Then you will be, I’m sure. And today is my debut for the hosting session, so Oh, there you go. See, no pressure then. Why traditional personas fail in the modern digital world No, I’m not threading it at all. No, no, it’s all cool. It’s all fine. Right. Shall I kick off? Yeah, sure. Go on. Let’s do it. Right. Well, it’s really good to have you all uh with me today and um it’s an interesting time, isn’t it? We’re living in an interesting world right now because everything seems like it’s changing. We’ve got obviously the huge innovations with AI that’s changing shopping habits and how people are are browsing and interacting with the web. We’ve also got a new generation of users coming up who who use the web in a very very different way. And so everything’s a little bit chaotic and uh it’s it’s in times like this where you kind of need to re-evaluate everything basically and you need to ask yourself are we doing things in the best way? Do we need to change in this new reality? And the the answer is well we probably do. Um and today I want to look at one specific area where I think things need to change which is personas. We all know about personas. We all know that they are a very useful tool or historically been a useful tool for focusing us on user needs. But I would argue that that really traditional personas kind of suck, right? Um that that these things that we produce because we’re supposed to produce them aren’t actually that useful in really understanding um our users and our users behavior and The shift to behavior-focused “functional personas” what it is that they do. um because they are they’re primarily kind of based around marketing, aren’t they? They’re they they’re focused very much on, you know, their likes and dislikes and their personality and all of those kinds of things. But actually, when it comes to making our websites more usable, that um kind of demographic way of looking at things isn’t necessarily the right approach. So, I believe that with the new AI tools that we’ve got um at our disposal, combined with the fact that we’ve got changing audience behaviors, now is a great time to reinvent the persona um into something that’s more functional and more useful for the work that we do and can be more informative um for the the design and development process of the websites that we’re creating. And um if we want our personas to really help improve conversion, we need to make sure that they’re they’re focusing on the right things. So for example, what goals and tasks a user is trying to um achieve on their website. Things like what questions and objections um that people need answering before they app. We heard in the last talk, didn’t we, about how one of the things that AI loves is questions and frequently asked questions because that’s what people are putting into AI. And so our website needs to be addressing those. But we also need to be addressing their objections. Why are people not buying? What’s stopping them from acting? Things like touch points, right? There was a stage where it was all pretty easy, wasn’t it really? when you designed um a website, people searched on a website, they went um they went to the website, they bought something. But now it’s so many more layers to it because we’ve got social media, we’ve got um AI, we’ve got mobile interactions, we’ve got customer service support, we’ve got uh delivery experiences, all these different touch points that together create the experience. Um, and then we also need personas that help us identify service gaps, places where we’re letting our customers down. So, there is so much more that we can do with personas than their demographics that they read the Guardian and drive an Audi, which have limited availability, I would argue. So, what are functional personas? This madeup word that I’ve just come up with to describe them. Um, and I’ve I’ve used that term really to differentiate them from traditional personas because one of the biggest problems I encounter is that um I work with clients that go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve already got personas, but they’ve got the demographic type of personas which have got limited use in conversion rate optimization and user experience design.” So, the kind of personas that Using AI to create multi-lens personas I’m creating today are more like this that I can create quite a suite of personas. This is one for a fashion um brand. Um and then with each of the personas that I’m creating, I can actually add quite a level of detail to give you a real sense of who these users are. So we can cover the basic stuff. We can give them a name and an occupation and an age. But then it gets interesting. We start including their goals and their pain points, their questions, the tasks that they want to complete, right? when and where they shop, their objections, what influences them, what triggers them. So there is huge potential to create much richer personas that contain really useful insights into um into user behavior. Um in today’s world, traditional personas often have this very rigid template that doesn’t fit all projects. And so it’s really important that we don’t replicate that mistake, right? And that as we create um functional personas that maybe we start considering creating different lenses to our personas, different versions of the same persona. So for example, with that fashion retailer I’m working with, the one that you saw there was the conversion rate optimization persona version lens, whatever you want to call it, right? But we equally produced one for the product team and that’s the same pe the same people in the personas but the information we included for the product team was different. was more focused on their taste, what they liked, what they disliked. And equally, there was a communications lens, you know, of the each of the personas, which was focused more on where they um you know, where they talk, you know, uh where they interact online, who they listen to, those kinds of things. So, there is very much an opportunity to create this wealth of information, not only way more personas than than we might previously have done. Someone just said in the in the chat that personas turn into this box text ticking exercise. We create them because that’s what you do. And so we have a small number and they’re not very they’re kind of vague and not very useful. Well, we can create a lot more of those with much more specific information and create different perspectives on those personas. Now, of course, the problem with that is that sounds like a lot of work, Paul, right? to create all of these personas is going to take us a long time and a lot of effort. But we live in a new reality, don’t we? We live in a reality of AI where we can do all of this that I’ve just talked about in a matter of minutes, right? And by that I mean less than an hour. full set of personas across multiple perspectives as a I mean obviously you’re going to need to edit them, tweak them, validate them and all of that, but the fundamentals we can get Key benefits: less research, more iteration, faster insights in place in less than an hour. And so what I’m going to talk you through is my process for doing that, right? But before I do that, let’s talk about the benefits of these kind of functional personas because they are really, really valuable once they’re in place. for a start by creating these functional personas um that are driven and created using AI is it actually lightens the load of the amount of user research that we need to do. Now user research is always going to be important. I am not suggesting that it isn’t but using the methodology I’m going to lay out we can um do that in the leanest way we possibly can as you’ll see in a minute. Secondly, they also these personas can be very easily updated and very easily iterated upon which means that we can keep them current as user behavior changes which it’s doing a lot at the moment. Then we can represent that and keep on top of that. And then finally, we can tie our personas to outcomes. So tasks, objections, uh, and proof points match straight onto things like our engagement funnel where we h, you know, we’re look working out the flow and when our messaging should be going out at different times and what that messaging should be. We can take the content of our personas and apply it directly to that kind of thing. So Step-by-step guide: from scattered data to AI-generated personas how can we use AI to create these amazing personas super fast? Well, first of all, we can start by taking all of that those scattered notes that we’ve got um about users and bringing it together into clean, easy to scan um uh themes. So, what do I mean by that? Well, chances are that your organization has loads of information um about your users, right? It might be anecdotes. It might be uh customer reviews and testimonials. It might be a previous survey that you run or even old personas. It might be um uh just call logs where or email uh transcripts from from conversations. And the trouble is we’ve got all of this information, but it’s all kind of woolly and it’s all over the place and everywhere. We can bring all of that together and use the power of AI to to identify reoccurring themes. um and and suck more value out of that user data we’ve already got rather than going away and doing new user research. Secondly, we can then spot segments um based on these themes that occur. So instead of grouping people by their demographics, we can instead group them by their behavior, by the things that they’re trying to do and trying to achieve. And that is a lot more useful when it comes to everything from communication to user experience, conversion rate optimization. We can also use AI to produce first drafts of these personas um and even journey maps as well very very quickly in a matter of minutes which means that we can constantly be iterating and refining and evolving our our understanding of users. And then we can iterate these with other stakeholders and even with um end users on the fly to get feedback and improve them per uh um you know kind of individually. So stepby-step guide how are we going to do this? Step one we’re going to in our large language model of choice we’re going to create a dedicated workspace. Right? So if you are in chat GPT or claude this is these are called projects. you create a project. Um, and you can also do this with uh Google Gemini. Um, I think they call them gems there, which is a bit of a weird name. I think um, Co-Pilot called them projects as well, although I can’t remember off Setting up your AI workspace like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini the top of my head. So, we create a project and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to upload everything that we can lay our hands on related to the user. So, this might be all of those things I said before, call logs, um, old surveys, analytics, data, whatever you got, and we’re going to dump it on in, right? But before we do that, we’re going to create some clear instructions. You could go in and you can add instructions to your project that you’re creating. So, your your instructions will vary depending on what it is you want to achieve, but here’s just a sample to get you thinking. As a user researcher, create realistic functional personas using the project files and public research. Come to that in a minute. Segment by needs, tasks, questions, pain points, or goals. You might want to change that depending on what lens you’re creating. And show your reasoning, and that’s an important thing which we’ll come to later. So, we add the instructions in. And then we upload whatever we have, right? Every file we can lay our hands on. So, interview transcripts, old personas, right? previous personas that have been created, survey results, support tickets, chat logs, analytics, anything that we can find, we’re going to just dump in there. Right now, once we’ve done that, we’re going to change tac just slightly for a moment and then we’re going to come back to that all those files. What we’re going to do next is we are going to run some deep online research. Okay. So, all of these tools have got some research mode and we’re going to go for that research mode. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to ask AI to go out onto the internet and see what people are saying about your product or service. Now, depending on your product and service and how well known it is, if you’re doing a startup, for example, right, then nobody’s going Using AI for deep online research & segmentation to be saying anything about your product or service. So what you do is you get it to do the same thing but on your competition. And if you don’t really know who your competition are, get it to do the research on the problem you’re solving. Right? So basically to go out and find out what people are saying about the area that you operate in. So we want to give it a role. We want to tell it that it’s got to go away and um you know act as a user researcher online. We’re going to give it a clear goal which is to build up insights and understanding about um user behavior with your product or service. We’ve got um ask uh it to test the quality of its output. So in other words, what we’re going to do is we’re going to advise it that um it needs to find actual quotes and links to those quotes and report those back so that we know it’s not hallucinating and making stuff up. We want it to provide references for the same reason. Um, and get those quotes that I’ve said, but the the ask it to test the quality of the output will also be getting it to go back over itself and say, “Right, okay. Once you’ve written this report, what I want you to do is go back through all those references and quotes and check that they’re genuine.” Right? So, it’s checking its own homework, so to speak. Um, we want it to list insights that you you require. So, you’re going to need to tell it what though what insights you’re after, you know, like tasks, questions, objections, etc. Um things like um other things I look at is sentiment. Are people positive about your product or negative about your product? Um questions that they have around your product, objections that they have which stops them buying your product, tasks that they want to complete with your product or in your product area, and goals and pain points that you can address. Right? So, we’re getting it to go out there and do a load of research. And then once it’s done all of that research, you can take the report that it gives you and you can then um upload that as another product, a project file. So, that could go alongside all of those other project files we created. And then what we need to do is get it to propose segmentation for our personas. to what segments, what groups of people are we going to have for our person uh personas. So, we’re going to say based on your project files and your deep research, propose an appropriate number of um segments that we can use for the creation of personas. And this is critical segment based on criteria such as need or behavior, not demographics. Right? So, it’s now going to go away and it’s going to segment your audience in a way that it feels is most appropriate based on the different themes that have emerged from its online research and its review of your product project files. Okay. Then once it’s done that, we’re going to then ask it to start drafting up Prompt template for persona creation personas, okay, for each of our different segments. And you need to do those one at a time. If you ask them to do them all in one go, it tends to do a bit of a shitty job. So, just get it to do one at a time. And what we’re going to tell it is we’re going to um say that it needs to state what this person’s goals and tasks are, what their objections and blockers are, highlight their pain points, show the various touch points and ways that people are going to be interacting, and identify service gaps where you might be letting them down. And so on the screen here, you can see a a bit of a template that you can you can steal. Um, and you basically tell it to fill in the gaps, right? Using all the information that it’s got. And it’s that simple. And it will produce detailed good quality in uh personas that um outline, you know, the behavior for the different audience. You can tweak the prompts obviously to to focus on different areas or different um uh lenses or ways of looking at your audience but basically it’s a really fast quick way of generating personas. Obviously however we do need to validate them right because as we all know AI hallucinates I always find it a bit funny mine that people say oh AI hallucinates it’s rubbish because we it hallucinates. Well, so do people. We make up stuff all the time. Um, so just like we need to check our own work, we need to check AI’s work, right? So, how are we going to validate it? We’re going to validate it in a couple of ways. First of all, um, if you’ve got access to your user audience, we’re going to show them some of the personas and say, ask them what which one of these do they feel like they can most associate with just to find out. And then what ways um uh do you feel you can you know you Validating personas with users and teams associate with? What elements do you feel you associate with? And what do you feel is missing? So a little bit of user research of passing these by um users makes a huge difference just to make sure you’re not going completely dally. Is that a very British euphemism? I think um dally. But anyway um you what you might want to do is if you’re going to do that in interview format. I mean there’s different ways you could do that. You could do that as a survey. You could do it as a, you know, um, document you send out and ask people to email their responses. You could do it as an interview. Whatever feedback you get, what we do is we upload that feedback into the AI as a project file and we say based on the feedback you’ve given, please now refine those personas. You don’t even need to do the refining yourself. We get AI to do that for you. And then the other audience that we can validate with is customerf facing staff. So if you’ve got people that are dealing with support tickets the whole time or salespeople or anybody inter interacting regularly with your end audience then we can pass this to them and ask them to do the same thing to say you know is this information correct? Is there anything missing etc etc. So by doing this you’re going to end up refining and improving your persona over time but also you’re going to continue over time to get more and more insights. you’re going to get more customer um testimonials and reviews and you’re going to get more analytics data and we can just every once in a while feed that back into the system and get it to update and you know improve the personas so you’ve always got fresh personas that are representative of users current behavior but there’s a little bit of troubleshooting that you need to consider um as you work through this uh process you will encounter some pitfalls and problems and I don’t want to oversell it as this utopia where everything is wonderful. So, let’s work through those very briefly. One thing you can end up with is too many personas, right? So, although you can create endless personas with this, you Common pitfalls: over-segmentation, hallucination, assumptions get to the point where you’re almost um splitting hairs and and that actually the personas very much overlap with one another and you can kind of overdo it. So I would suggest that you, you know, you maybe start with lots because you can and then over time start to combine or remove um you know uh personas that are not so good, right? Um and then over time you will end up with a more and more refined. It’s all about fast iteration to get you where you want to be. Secondly, you will find that some stakeholders want demographic information that they want that kind of stuff. Um, but I would encourage you to avoid that and uh unless it affects their behav the users’s behavior in some way. Um, otherwise just leave it out. It will be a distraction. Um, but like I said, you can create separate personas for different functions. So, a com’s persona, a um a conversion rate optimization persona, a a user experience persona, or whatever else you want. We’ve talked about AI hallucinations, right? If you get stuff back in the persona and it says something in there and you’re like, I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure whether I believe that. Where did it get that from? Ask it. Say, you’ve said this in your persona. What led you to this conclusion? Right? and it will come back with a load of justification. But then you need to follow up and say, “Okay, give me specific quotes and references to justify that justification you’ve just given me.” Right? So that you know that it’s actually basing it on reality and not pulling it out of its mental virtual ass. Um and then finally, you might feel like you’ve not got enough data. Um and that’s fine. Um, you can mark assumptions as assumptions in your persona. Um, and you know, just so as you look down the persona, if there are things that aren’t really backed up, but you feel are probably right, then that’s absolutely fine. Just mark them as an assumption. Um, and then later on, you can do maybe when you’ve got a bit of time and a bit of energy, you can do some surveying or some quick usability testing or something like that to to validate whether those things are real. And really the most important part of all of this is to keep it alive, right? Make sure that you’re regularly revisiting this. You know, maybe schedule a refresh every year or whenever there’s major changes in behavior happening or when your product or service changes and you know, maybe you launch a new version of your software or you know or you pivot the business slightly, right? you could just rerun your research, regenerate those summaries, and archive any outofdate um Keeping personas alive with regular updates assumptions that you’ve made. So, we’ve got our personas, right? But let’s take a moment just to ask the question, well, what are we going to do with them? Because this is the the other big problem I think with personas is we go through the exercise of creating these personas, um but then we don’t really make good use of them. They end up getting shoved in a drawer somewhere and ignored and all of that effort was absolutely wasted, right? It was a thing. It was that checkboxing exercise again. Oh, tick box, whatever. You know what I mean? So, how are we going to make use of our personas? Well, the first thing you want to do is you need to um use them as part of a process for creating site navigation, um creating information architecture, creating uh e-commerce categorization and that kind of stuff. So you can use methodologies like top task analysis alongside personas to start building out an information architecture or product Applying personas to navigation, content, and journey mapping categorization that is based on the personas and users needs and tasks rather than how you organize and think about things internally. Secondly, you can use these personas to map things like user objections and um FAQs. It can also help inform things like case studies and microcopy FAQs in particular and objection handling in particular are excellent things that you can draw out those personas and start addressing on your website and I’m happy to cover those more in Q&A if you want to. Then we can also um use it um personas as a starting point for things like journey mapping um where we look at the flow um and the the steps of that a user passes through in their journey. And we can then use that to map against process flows of of how someone um moves through your application or your website and um h what questions and objections they have at different points during that journey. Um, and then also they’re incredibly useful for conversion. They help inform your calls to action um, based on your persona’s readiness, their goals, and their pain points. So, it can be incredibly insightful for that. And we can use personas as a basis for tracking our KPIs and identifying um, uh, KPIs that are of real value rather than just um, vanity metrics. So, I’ve blasted that through that really fast because I wanted to leave enough time for questions. But what I will say is I’ve written a couple of articles that build on these themes, right? So, the one on the left is really kind of covering everything that we’ve just talked about um and about personas and how to make them useful and functional. But also I’ve got another very detailed guide about mapping customer journeys which is a basically think of them as uh customer journeys are personas but over time because people’s questions and objections and goals change as they interact with you. So um hopefully that’s useful and points you in the the right direction and get started. But I want to stop now with my slides because I want to answer your questions and dive into a little bit more detail. So, what have we got? Any questions? Is someone going to help me with the questions or shall I go back through the chat? Great. This was insightful, Paul. And I loved it and I’m sure our audience are going to take back home some in some practical insights that they are going to work I mean right from the word go. So as you mentioned like let’s move towards the Q&As’s and let me uh what you got let me get through the questions. So the first question that we have is from Nib. I’m putting that on the screen now. So he’s asking connect personas to conversions. How do you map objections, content proof points, UI changes in a traceable way? So, I mean, personas are just one tool in our arsenal. I’m not going to claim that they’re this magic tool that you know that that will solve all your problems. But a good set of personas um will identify two things. They will identify um especially no I’m going to lie they identify they provide one thing which is they list your person uh your objections right what is it that’s stopping a user from acting on your site now when combined with journey mapping right it’ll also tell you when somebody is likely to think of that objection okay so is that objection going to be in their mind right at the beginning of the project uh um their journey or are they Live Q&A: Mapping objections to UI, tracking behavior, leadership buy-in only going to think of it when it comes to the moment of payment or whatever else. And once you know your objections and you know um when in the journey someone has that objection then you can start bringing those th those objections or answers to those objections into the user interface. So a classic example, I haven’t got the the the screen handy unfortunately, but um I do a lot of work in in charity donations, right? So imagine a donation form and in those donation forms that you’re you’re asking questions like, you know, how much do people want to give? How regularly do they want to give? You’re asking them to enter credit card information, all these kinds of things. Now often times when I design that almost alongside every field I have an objection handling statement to address that fear that people have. So for example they’re faced with a toggle monthly or one off. What’s the objection there? Well the objection is um that you know oh what if you know I can’t continue to give monthly is it easy to cancel? Right? So we add the objection handling statement of you can cancel at any time with one click written right alongside the the form field. So it really does you know you can take those objections and start mapping them very specifically to UI changes. Um but can you necessarily track all of those? Probably not just with personas. Okay. Moving towards uh next questions. So it’s from Curtis. He’s asking when trying to use tools like website heat maps, is there a way to tack personas to see who is staying where, etc.? Oh, wouldn’t that be great? Um, you can kind of do you can kind of do it in some ways. very I’m I’m I’m coming back to be bitten by my own smartass comment in the chat earlier where I I was rude about the um quiz and I said the answer is always it depends and and that’s exactly where I find myself now. It depends. Um what you can do is you can um tag people based on the content that they have viewed on the website. So for example, you could um if we know that somebody has a specific question, you know, a persona type has a specific question, then if somebody goes to a page which answers that question, we could tag them as potentially being a part of that segmentation, right? Also, of course, you can do coms campaigns specific to different uh persona groups, right? And so if somebody is coming in through a marketing channel that was targeting a Pacific persona group, we can obviously tag them as well as being a part of that persona group with a some degree of certainty. You know, it’s it’s all up in the air a little bit. And the other thing you can do is occasionally we build um pages. It’s appropriate to build pages that are dedicated to particular audiences, like landing pages for particular audiences. So, I’m working on a a website um a nursery website at the moment that that sells trees and that kind of thing. And one of the audiences they’re targeting is hunters um who want to create a nice environment that attracts wildlife to it. And so, um we’ve created a landing page dedicated to hunters that matches our persona for hunters. So, as soon as they hit that landing page, we can now tag them as being hunters. So, there are ways and means, but it’s, you know, it’s messy. It’s not 100% perfect. Nothing ever is, is it really? Does that answer the question? Next one. So, the next question is from Darren, and he’s asking, “What are the biggest mistakes we should avoid using AI to generate personas?” um not double-checking that that what what it’s saying um is valid because a the trouble with AI and I’m sure you’re all aware of this now is it can sound very compelling and very um persuasive but that doesn’t mean it necessarily is um correct that is so you do need to ask it okay why you know why this approach you know why have you said this thing what was it you were thinking here blah blah blah where Did you get that information? So you need to question and challenge it the whole time. Otherwise it will talk what we saying in the UK it will talk bollocks at you. So uh I have one very long question and and an interesting one now which is from Usma. She’s asking how do you convince leadership at an organization that’s bent on following the traditional personas instead of trying to functional approach you’re advocating is there a seinal study we can reference to show the fulfill the traditional demographic based personas um no there isn’t um a study at least not one that I found annoyingly the approach I took because I come across this problem all the And the approach that I take is incredibly simple. I don’t call it a persona, right? I just say I need and you can give it whatever name you want. You can call it a functional persona. You can call it an empathy map. Make up some name, right? I need this asset to be able to do my job. You can still have your traditional persona, right? That’s nothing to do with me, right? Or what I’m trying to achieve. I need this to do my job. And that tends to make it a lot easier. Um the other thing that makes it a lot easier is that you in doing it the way that I’m proposing, we’re not at any stage say you’re saying, “Oh, we need to go away and do three weeks of additional user research or you know, it’s very lightweight. It’s very easy to do.” So really, there’s no reason for them to say no because it’s not going to cost them anything or take anything. So this is one of those scenarios where really I just wouldn’t ask for permission. I would just go ahead and create it for yourself and start referencing it. Um, and if you need to give it a different name, give it a different name. That’s my attitude. Great. I wish we can take more questions, but of course we have to take care of the time limit that we have here. So, I would like to thank you again, Paul, for being at the Prepathon. And first of and before you leave, I would like to ask you like how was your Closing remarks & fun banter experience of being Oh, it was awful. It was terrible. Let’s just I’m going to be rude about your question. Right. So, what I mean what how is any speaker going to say, “Oh, no. It was absolutely awful.” So, I think it’s a fundamentally flawed question and I reject the premise of your question. No, it’s been great. You guys have been great. You’ve been really supportive and nice. the the people in the room are really engaged, which is always fun. And um yeah, I I love doing this kind of stuff. So, um I can’t believe that you’re offering like what is it? A three-day conference for nothing. Yeah, it is. I mean, that’s that’s crazy biscuits. You you’re putting a load of very hardworking events organizers out of a job by doing this for free. So, I hope you feel bad. Great. That’s all what we wanted to hear. So, so that’s a wrap for this session and coming up next is another amazing activity that Moise is going to conduct and he’ll going to rejoin the stage to do the activity called AI or not. I hope you’ll like it and it’s a bye from my side. Take care everyone.