This is a series of posts describing how you create personas, how you use them and how they help you achieve your goals. In this post I’ll give you a brief introduction on what personas actually are, what they’re made up of and why you should make them.

Traditional web analytics gives an excellent overview on what’s going on at your web site. With KPIs correctly set up, you’ll get pretty good answers on how well your site is performing within a certain set of criteria.

Still, no matter how good you are setting up and tracking your KPIs, the most important question remains unanswered: Why is this happening?

Our webshop is doing ok. However, to reach our sales goals this year we have to drastically improve our conversion rate by making more customers out of the users in our webshop. What we’re looking for is at least a 0.5% increase, and while that may not sound like much, we have some steep cliffs to climb before the numbers start nudging in the right direction.

In order to know what kind of questions to ask our customers, we created a set of scenarios imagining why a user would not convert into a paying customer.