How We’re Using Personas to Better Understand Your Needs

Otmane El Rhazi from USA.gov.

By Michelle Chronister, User Experience Team Lead

Personas are fictional characters that describe an organization’s customer behaviors, emotions, attributes, motivations, and goals. They are an important tool to share customer insights and understanding across an organization. Personas also serve as a check to make sure an organization’s actions meet the needs of the majority of customers, including visitors to the website, contact center, in-person visits, and interactive voice response (IVR) self service customers.

Updating our Personas

Personas aren’t new to us at USA.gov. We developed personas several years ago because we recognized the importance of understanding customer needs.

We recently created new personas [PDF] of the customers who currently use USA.gov and 1-844-USA-GOV1 based on the themes and insights observed from several different data sets. We reviewed the following 2014 data:

• USA.gov Web analytics (via the Digital Analytics Program), including demographics, devices, common paths, popular pages, and outbound links
  


• Onsite search data from DigitalGov Search
  


• USA.gov customer satisfaction survey data
  


• Searches on Google that led customers to USA.gov (via Google Webmaster Tools)
  


• 1-844-USA-GOV1 contact center content usage
  


• Web analytics for other government websites available through the Digital Analytics Program
  


• General search trends on Google
  

What We Learned

You, our customers, are diverse and come to us with a range of goals and to find a broad scope of information and services. We categorized your needs by type of information seeking behavior:

• Complete a transaction (or find information to prepare to complete a transaction)
  


• Find specific information on a known topic
  


• Browse information or learn more on a general topic
  


• Find contact information for an agency or elected official
  

These categories aren’t perfect – there is overlap between the customer types. You may have multiple needs, but we still think these personas are useful for thinking about how you look for information.

If you’re curious, you can read more about the specific personas we developed and find our next steps over on Digitalgov.gov.