Persona Best Practices Of UK Interactive Agencies

Forrester applied its persona evaluation criteria to reference personas provided by nine interactive agencies in the UK for the recent Forrester Wave™. Most of the personas showed some room for improvement, with problems running the gamut in both type and severity. However, our evaluations also revealed a number of best practices, including EMC Consulting's use of rich background detail to give a realistic quality to its persona for a financial services company; the usability of AKQA's succinct but revealing persona; and the use of a first-person voice to achieve engaging narratives in personas by AKQA, EMC Consulting, LBi, and Reading Room. To get the most out of persona projects, customer experience professionals should kick off projects with assumption persona workshops to ensure buy-in from key stakeholders, insist that personas are based on robust ethnographic research, plan a calendar of events to promote ongoing use, and create a repository of research so that personas can evolve to help all parts of the company's Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) strategy.