As part of the process to fine tune my UX skills I am consulting with several small businesses to develop their websites. One of the businesses is an independent yarn dyer wanting to expand into online sales. To get a feel for their target audience I interviewed local yarn store employees. The customer base for a small yarn store strongly overlaps the customer base for an independent yarn dyer. In both cases, customers know that other options besides big box craft stores exist and are willing to pay premium prices for high quality goods.
Long-term yarn store employees have a great sense of the types of people who come in to shop or call with questions along with the goals and concerns those people have. After the information gathering sessions I compiled these insights into customer archetypes.
These customer archetypes are referred to as personas in UX-speak. A persona is a fictitious person created to represent a specific group of users that share similar goals when accessing the site or app.
The personas help the end-user seem more concrete during the development process. When questions arise the designers can think about it in the context of the personas to make a decision.
Due to budget constraints I kept the content of the personas to a minimum and presented the business with an overview of the most relevant details.
Here are the six personas, displayed here with permission from the business.
