The BOTfriends Persona Canvas - 10 steps to really understand your target group | Part 2

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.

In Part 1 our series, we have developed the personality and character traits of our persona and by now have a clear picture of her in our minds. Now we round off the personal attributions with a background story and focus even more on the contact with our product or service.

In this section, the background story of the persona is briefly recorded. In about three sentences, information about its background can be specified, thus including additional information about the persona's mindset.

The definition of the Values / Goals and Pain Points is the heart of a persona. Here, too, it is always important to keep the context in mind. Once the persona is complete, this section is used as the basis for the persona's influence on the development process. The pain points here represent the reasons why the persona cannot achieve its goals. These insights can, for example, provide hints for new features for your bot or positively influence basic product decisions. Values and Goals describe their mindset in more detail and provide information about the values according to which the persona acts and what they would like to achieve.

The prior experience of your users can vary greatly, which is why this section of the BOTfriends Persona Canvas gives you the opportunity to record their technical expertise in areas such as chatbots, voice assistants, but also their enthusiasm for innovations. This should give you an easy overview of what technical skills you can expect from your target audience and what level of acceptance for your bot can be expected from individual groups. This information can also be very useful for marketing your chatbot.

The "Day In The Life Model" is a tool from the design thinking process. As part of the BOTfriends Persona Canvas, we go one step further and record the expected effects of the release on the everyday life of your future users.
"Before The Release" is intended to clarify the user's problem and highlight the pain points in their everyday life.

The problem solved by your chatbot can be defined in more detail in the "Problems to Be Solved" field. "Problems to Be Solved" are not identical to Pain Points, because unlike the latter, the problems to be solved are use case specific and show the direct impact of the Pain Points in everyday life.

A persona embodies preferences and expectations of your product, as well as a way of interacting with your bot. So always consider which characters your target group can be divided into and create a meaningful persona based on data for the most important user groups. For this purpose, you can ask colleagues from customer support or employees with a lot of customer contact. Optimally, a user survey on "Goals", "Pain Points" or "Problems to Be Solved" can also offer great added value, despite the greater effort involved. Information such as hobbies that have nothing to do with the use case, sensitive information such as origin, sexual and religious orientation or stereotypes are irrelevant when creating a persona. During the process, you can also ask guiding questions, such as for our example, "What would Marie want?" "How would she behave?", or "What could we use to solve her problems?" to thereby create a User Centered Design. Good luck!

If you want to develop a chatbot concept for your persona, our Chatbot Canvas will help you. With it, we guide you step by step through the entire process.