From the persona to the story

Personas are target group representatives. They stereotypically represent a certain type of customer or consumer that you want to reach. They help to better represent and get to know a target group. In this way, products and company processes can be geared especially to the target group - including storytelling, e.g. for the user story. Because without the appropriate empathy, there is a danger of developing products without the customer in mind or designing applications for a customer who does not even exist.

The journey begins with user data

User data is essential to create custom-fit personas. Many companies rely solely on their intuition when developing personas. What they forget in the process: The personas remain abstract. It cannot be verified whether this type of customer actually makes up the majority of the target group. Because: You are sure to find an example of a consumer who corresponds exactly to the persona you have thought up. But how transferable are these assumptions?

Better: Collect user data or use existing data, facts and figures. Important sources for this can be existing studies, e.g. from market research or publicly accessible statistics, e.g. from the Federal Statistical Office. Surveys and studies conducted in-house as well as website data or visitor analyses can also form a helpful data basis. The collected data enables you to really understand your users and customers. The data-driven persona forms the basis for building the user story.

No user story without a persona

The more data you have been able to collect, the more concrete and comprehensive your persona becomes. It makes it possible to find certain patterns in user behaviour, which you can then link to with your user story. Example: Your persona "Sophia" shops almost exclusively online? Then you are more likely to reach "Sophia" with online advertising instead of newspaper ads and should give preference to online media for communication measures.

Our credo is therefore: No user story and no customer journey without at least one persona. A persona helps to get to know the behaviour, motivations, frustrations and goals of the users. For this, it should be based on real user data.

Structure of the narrative

Once you have created one data-driven persona or several relevant personas, the next step is: how do I build the user story? First, we need to learn to understand the persona.

We recommend creating a grid with 3 x 6 columns. In the columns put the names of the persona and things they like and things they don't like. In the rows you enter the 5 touchpoints with your product or service. You can also use more than 5 rows if you need them. It all depends on what you define as touchpoints. This can be anything from registration to paid membership.

Your table should then look like this:

Using this matrix, you can now create an overview with things that your data-driven persona likes or dislikes. You should work on this overview for all relevant personas, because the central waypoints of the story result from this. The more perspectives you have on the user journey, the better you can design the user story and select communication measures.

Time for history

Now the journey begins - it's time to tell your story. First of all, you should visualise all touchpoints on a sheet of paper or on your computer. It might look something like this:

Awareness -> Onboarding -> Membership -> Activity -> Referral

This is what your journey looks like. This journey should now be populated with content to pick up the user. Think of it as a scavenger hunt: The waypoints are clear, now you need to connect them through clues and contextualisation.

Add a few sentences above each touchpoint that give insight into the user's mindset - based on the previous exercise. A few sentences are enough for this. Then, underneath, put a short summary in the form of bullet points. This should remind the user of the purpose of each touchpoint.

An example: We are talking about a fitness app for our persona Sophia. The point Awareness could then look like this:

In the last step, list things that appeal or bother the user in the design of the product or service. You should always have this list to hand as it makes decision-making easier.

The Journey Framework

If you have followed all these steps, you should now have not only a data-driven personabut also a user journey and the corresponding framework. These are all guides for communicating with your customers. You can use these results to create experiences that really reach your customer. Based on the data-based persona, you can be sure that you are actually addressing your target group.

The next step is to start testing directly with the help of the user journey. From this, you can develop an experience map. To do this, test the touchpoints with different users to see if patterns emerge in the user journey. You can then determine which areas of the user journey cause the most friction or "pain" for the user - so-called pain points.

If you follow all these steps, you will get a powerful tool for designing the user story. You also get the requirements that users have for your product or service - and you can improve product development as well.

Of course, you can also customise all steps so that they go hand in hand with the processes in your company.

Example:

Here you can see in the upper half the customer journey and in which phase, which actions are expected from the customers and how to measure a successful action. So first you need to know the target group and then you can determine in which phase they should be addressed and how.
In the lower half, the appropriate communication and advertising measures are assigned to the touchpoints. Depending on which phase the consumer is in, different offers can be useful or target-oriented.

Excursus: The story within the story

By the way, not only does successful storytelling need a data-driven persona, but the persona also needs successful storytelling. Without a story behind it, without connections and context, the persona is just a profile - a collection of facts and figures.

With the help of sensibly used stories, we put the persona into context. This makes it more dynamic and lively. The imagination is stimulated and we perceive the persona not as an abstract entity but as a real person. All employees can imagine this real person. It thus remains easier in the mind and can always be present in the creation of various measures and in decision-making in the company.

Therefore, not only appealing texts, but also pictures and photos as well as a name and a suitable slogan or motto help to underline the persona. You can see what this can look like with our example personas.