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Customer scenarios

 are developed for different personas. Patricia Seybold in the book 

The Customer Revolution (Seybold and Marshak, 2001) explains them as follows:

A customer scenario is a set of tasks that a particular customer wants or needs to do in 

order to accomplish his or her desired outcome.

You will see that scenarios can be developed for each persona. Each scenario is split up into a 

series of steps or tasks, which can be best thought of as a series of questions a visitor asks. By 

identifying questions website designers identify the information needs of different customer 

types at different stages in the buying process.

The use of scenarios is a simple, but very powerful web design technique that is still relatively 

rare in website design. They can also be used when benchmarking competitor sites as part of situ-

ation analysis. The following are some guidelines and ideas on what can be included when devel-

oping a persona. The start or end point is to give each persona a name. The detailed stages are:

1 

Build personal attributes into personas:

● 

Demographic: age, sex, education, occupation and for B2B, company size, position in 

buying unit

● 

Psychographic: goals, tasks, motivation

● 

Webographics: web experience (months), usage location (home or work), usage plat-

form (dial-up, broadband), usage frequency, favourite sites.

2 

Remember that personas are only models of characteristics and environment:

● 

Design targets

● 

Stereotypes

● 

Three or four usually suffice to improve general usability, but more are needed for spe-

cific behaviours

● 

Choose one primary persona which, if satisfied, means others are likely to be satisfied.

3 

Different scenarios can be developed for each persona as explained further below. Write 

three or four, for example:

● 

 Information-  seeking scenario (leads to site registration)

● 

Purchase scenario – new customer (leads to sale)

● 

Purchase scenario – existing customer (leads to sale).

Once different personas have been developed that are representative of key  site-  visitor types 

or customer types, a 

primary persona

 is sometimes identified. Wodtke (2002) says:

Your primary persona needs to be a common user type who is both important to the busi-

ness success of the product and needy from a design point of view – in other words, a 

beginner user or a technologically challenged one.

She also says that secondary personas can also be developed such as  super-  users or complete 

novices. Complementary personas are those that don’t fit into the main categories which dis-

play unusual behaviour. Such complementary personas help ‘out-of-box thinking’ and offer 

choices or content that may appeal to all users.

For another example of the application of personas, see Mini case study 11.1 about paint 

manufacturer Dulux.