BOTfriends Persona Canvas

The target groups of a chatbot are as diverse as the possible areas of application of artificial intelligence. In order not to lose focus during the development of your virtual assistant, the BOTfriends Persona Canvas will help you to create in-depth and elaborated personas and thus adapt your chatbot even better to future users.

Knowing your target audience can give you a big advantage in design decisions as well as in the development process and increase customer satisfaction. Personas can help your team focus on real user needs and give personality to a previously anonymous target audience. However, their greatest value lies in providing a common basis for communication.

Know your target audience with the BOTfriends Persona Canvas


What are the benefits of the BOTfriends Persona Canvas?

The goal of the Persona Canvas is to provide you with a guide or framework on how to design a chatbot customized to your target audience. This involves creating a common ground for your team and analyzing, understanding and leveraging the characteristics and needs of the future users.

Designing a persona is a time-consuming process that can be done with a lot of attention to detail. The difficulty here is not to lose focus on the essential information and characteristics of the persona. With the help of the Persona Canvas, you can use a template to answer various questions about your target audience.

 

What is this article about?

Together, in our two-part series, we will use the BOTfriends Persona Canvas to create a fictional persona for illustration. The Canvas is divided into 10 sections:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Each of these sections is explained in more detail and followed by an example.

"With the BOTfriends Persona Canvas, we give you a template with which it is now even easier to design a persona perfectly tailored to your target group."

Download here

Step 1: Find a stock photo for your persona

As we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words. Therefore, choose the image for your persona carefully. It should not look too posed and should always embody a person who could actually belong to the target group. Stock photos are best suited. However, you can also ask one of your customers if you may use his/her photo. Do not choose a photo of a person you already know, otherwise you will always associate certain characteristics with your persona, which may not be representative.

I have chosen this picture for my persona:

pexels.com/photo/
woman-using-a-
sewing-machine-
3738098/

Step 2: Set demographic information for your persona

To breathe life into your persona, let's give it a name and set some demographic data. You can choose the name any way you like, but make sure you don't already associate certain characteristics with it. Do not give your persona a name of a well-known person. The demographic data should reflect the target group you want to represent.

Step 3: Find three matching character traits

The "Characteristics" section is ideal for describing the persona with the help of three keywords. Make sure that they convey information about the persona's behavior and are not too generic. Check whether they offer an informative added value for the persona. Adjectives such as kind or friendly are much less meaningful than, for example, committed, cautious or conscientious.

Step 4: Choose an appropriate quote that reflects the character of the persona

Our persona now already has a face, a name and also a few character traits. In order to consolidate the image of the character, in this step we will come up with a quote based on the keywords, which your persona could really have said. Here, the content of the quote should have something to do with the context, maybe even with the use case. If you have previously filled out the BOTfriends Chatbot Canvas, you can use the Use Case defined there as a guide.

A quotation makes the persona appear more alive and is easier to anticipate in the later development process.

Step 5: Define the persona's interests and motivation

In the next step, we want to look at the interests and motivation of our persona. It is important to understand what drives them. For this, you can ask yourself what makes the persona happy and what gets their attention. Furthermore, we want to find out what frustrates them and based on this insight, we want to adapt our chatbot even better to their needs.

Keep in mind that while the persona is an individual customer, it should be representative of a type of interaction with your chatbot. So, if it's about food, as in our example, you should create a persona for your "conscious eater" target group and a persona for the "casual eater" target group who prefers fast food.

In addition, we want to address here both the motivation from the private life, but also the working world of the persona. If the chatbot is to be used in a professional context, the motivation for using the service can also be the focus here. In this section, it is especially important that the information is based on real data and that you are not just making assumptions. When discussing this with your team, make sure you don't get bogged down in details and don't lose sight of the context of the persona's use case.

In the next part we develop a short background story, take a closer look at the persona's everyday life and consider her competences. We also define the core - their values, goals and pain points.

Part 2Download here