How to Design a Persona-Centric Website Experience?

By: Tricia Teo

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Website

01 Apr 2021

How to design a persona-centric website experience - Verz Design


What is a Persona-Centric Website Experience?

It’s about crafting your website’s design, content and experience based on the specific target audiences that you want to attract. It helps deliver an experience that makes it clear on what your website is and why your audience should care. But before you create a Persona-Centric Website Experience, here are some of the factors that you need to consider:

  • Discover Your Audience: Identify your audience by researching their personality, job title, industry information and other necessary demographic information. Doing so helps you understand who your customers are and also sets a base for your website. 
  • Identify Their Needs: Understand the problems that they are trying to solve, the information that they need the most and the information they are looking for.
  • Map Out Their Journey: Developing their behavior profile gives you an idea of what your customers are looking for. Also, it gives you insights on how often they search for your product and how long they stay on your website.

Understanding Your User’s Persona Through Research & User Insights

Understanding your user’s persona through research & user insights

Before designing a persona-centric website experience, you need to do research on both your audience and your competitors. That’s the fundamental of all fundamentals before you start your actual designs.

How to research your target audiences’ persona

Researching about your target audiences’ persona is as important as your competitors. But how should we research our target audiences’ persona? Well, personas can be created by gathering the results of information through interviews or focus groups with actual customers. Additionally, researching their psychological personalities is also a good way to do this.

With each created persona, it helps identify the demographic characteristics of your target audience. Each individual persona will have their own demographic charts with score factors related to the company’s products or services.

Competitor Research

Your future, or even current, customers are also your competitors’. Knowing this, every customer the competition has will need to be convinced that you are better, especially if you want to win them over.

When you conduct a proper competitor analysis, you need to tune into their strengths and weaknesses. This analysis can provide critical insights about what it will take to get customers to switch to your brand. 

Customer Journey Maps

After researching your target audience and competitors, the next thing you’ll need is a Customer Journey Map. With customer journey maps, you’re following the path of the customers during their problem-solving phase. 

Start with a common problem that your customer has and do the same research. Visit the same websites, read the same articles and go through your current buyer journey. From there, you’ll start to see things from their perspective and find potential gaps and opportunities to improve your process.

The purpose is to identify any parts of your process that don’t work or feel obstructive. Using those insights, you’ll be able to streamline the customer experience, providing more value at every stage of their journey. 

Next, you’ll create a customer journey map as if the lead had an optimal experience. You’ll fill in every step to reflect the type of experience your customer would love to have. 

Applying Your User’s Persona In Design

Applying your user’s persona in design

When you start planning on designing a persona-centric website experience, you will need to use the personas that you have created. These will judge the effectiveness of the website’s various elements throughout the process. All in all, they affect the outcome and analytics of your site.

When designing a persona-centric website experience, you need to think about these 3 main elements:

  • Strong Call-To-Action: What kind of interaction button is suitable for the target audience based on their needs?
  • Tagline and short description write up: Catchy tagline or description that will hook the audience and keep them on the website.
  • Features and functionalities that cater to the user’s needs: How often does the audience need a certain feature? What kind of functionalities are more useful for your audience?

Testing Your Design With Your Users

Testing your design with your users

Once you have designed a persona-centric website, it is important to test it with your audience. These are the 3 reasons why you need to do this:

  1. Always Improve: Change your mindset from one-off-project web design to ongoing improvements. You should be aiming to make small iterations regularly based on the feedback system you have set up. This allows you to improve your offering in line with your audience feedback and to earn their trust over time.
  2. Use Data to Make Decisions: Use the data from usability tests, website analytics and feedback surveys at your disposal to back up website design decisions and changes. Don’t be tempted to make changes based on assumptions alone.
  3. Talk the Talk: Use your customer’s language, not yours. Pay attention to how customers describe what you do and update your website content to reflect this. Too often we get caught up in our own ideas about how to portray the brand and forget who we’re trying to sell to.

Conclusion

Designing a persona-centric website experience is no easy task. Doing so requires you to go through the three steps mentioned above. You’ll need extensive research on your user’s persona. Then, you’ll have to apply it into a design and test it to determine whether or not you’ve done it correctly.


Designing a persona-centric experience for your users is key to having a successful website. It’s a challenging task, but Verz is up to the challenge! If you’re interested in boosting your business’ website, ring us up at 6841 1680 or email us at enquiry@verzdesign.com.

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