Why am I talking about Digital Personas in this post? Well, I use this concept in pretty much every project I work on. Here I explore what is a Digital Persona and how it is has become so valuable to my requirements gathering and really helping me get underneath the skin of a project.

From what I hear, the concept of a Marketing Persona or Digital Persona has been used in marketing for a number of years, and is growing in popularity. For the marketing agency chaps, it’s a way for them to better understand or profile their customers. To learn more about what their customers want; their online behavior; their spending habits, and so on. Especially as we move into the Cloud arena of more advanced Internet technology, then this client profiling is becoming ever more prevalent.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. I would like to give a brief insight into how I have used this concept when designing software systems.

In order to deliver a successful piece of software or website, it’s very important to glean the requirements of your users. Talking to your potential users is the best way of understanding their business and what they need the software to deliver. That’s a given. But the concept of ‘Digital Personas’ takes this on a step. In part, by expanding the scope beyond your immediate sphere of users.

To better understand what I am talking about, it’s probably worthwhile explaining what a Digital Persona is. I suppose we could say it’s a person’s role or function in respect of your project. Any person that is connected with your system in some way would be included in your list of Digital Personas. And this is good because not only does it expand the scope of the people you might talk to, it also expands your insight into the requirements for the system you aspire to build. Because every Digital Persona will see the system from a different perspective – from their own perspective. In terms of a travel website, the ‘Business Traveler’ would have requirements different to the ‘Private Traveler’; the ‘Taxi Driver’ would have different requirements of the new system to that of the ‘User’ back at headquarters. But by capturing all these requirements and categorising them under each Digital Persona, a much broader set of requirements is gathered. Which should hopefully lead to a much better system design and overall service delivery.

Some people have asked the question as to why would we want to talk with people on the ground – the customers, the people in the factory, the people on the shop floor? Well, apart from the reasons I’ve already mentioned, I usually find that these are the places where the little ideas that are pure nuggets of gold can be found. The snippets of requirements that nobody involved in the top end of the business might think of, but might be so valuable to the business as a whole, let alone the software project. For example, a customer ‘digital persona’ might have a requirement that’s so far off the chart that it might lead to a new business idea. An idea that could be a new source of revenue. A ‘Machine Operator’ might have been using a manufacturing technique that, if incorporated into the new software, could save time and money. A ‘shop worker’ digital persona might have an idea for learning more about her customer, that could lead to better sales.

For me, the concept of digital personas has let me better understand the requirements from a broader spectrum of people that are in some way connected with a project. By workshopping this technique I have been able to get a broader set of business requirements along with a better understanding of a client’s business. And, I think best of all, it really has been a mechanism for attaining some little nuggets of wonderful ideas that have sprinkled gold dust over one or two projects.