Now and then, we come across a product or service that comes into an already-crowded marketplace and yet manages to establish itself as the new standard in its market. Some examples of these innovators are Google (which managed to penetrate through the crowded search engine space with its search technology that beat the rest of the competition) and MySpace (which picked up the lessons learnt from earlier social network sites and corrected the mistakes/effectively addressed the pain-points).

There are two key methods that smart companies use to create winning products in mature markets. First, they understand their target market and where the current products fall short. This is done by bringing in personas in your design decisions.

Some of the things that you certainly need to look at are:

• Persona is about real people that you would meet, talk with and observe
• Don’t start with a method or methodology and keep it intuitive
• Persona is all about role-play and getting in to their skins
• Base it on first-hand user knowledge and primary experience

In effect, persona profiling is not about market segmentation, customer profiling or workflow analysis. Neither do they fit preconceptions, use-cases or demographic models, because reality is often times more difficult that what we think. Personas aren’t supposed to make us feel comfortable about our design decisions; in fact, they should do just the opposite and can keep us honest.

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