Coming Face-to-Face with your Persona in Real Life

About a year ago, I had the opportunity to conduct a comprehensive content strategy project for USCitizenship.com, which internally describes itself as TurboTax for green cards. I wasn't just designing the navigation or planning future content; this initiative strove to benchmark the journey that immigrants take when navigating a path towards green card citizenship and align those benchmarks with key content and service needs along the way.

To build a robust content strategy, I embarked on the task of developing several core personas that served as the foundation for the overall approach. We consider these proto-personas, because they were constructed from a combination of data resources that did not include interviews with actual end users. Instead these proto-personas came from interviews with immigration lawyers and customer support staff, national immigration data, and statistics pulled with the assistance of AI services. Both the interviews and real-life encounters helped shed light on the mental and behavioral experiences and obstacles faced by immigrants. By synthesizing this information, I was able to create detailed profiles that represented the diverse needs and motivations of our end users.

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Recently, during a casual conversation with my coworker at Magellan Health, I experienced an unexpected yet delightful moment of realization. As we chatted, I discovered that I was speaking with someone who perfectly embodied one of the personas I had developed for USCitizenship.com. This encounter was not just coincidental; it felt like a tangible manifestation of the research and insights I had gathered. It was a fascinating experience to see how the theoretical representation I had created was grounded in real-life individuals with real stories and aspirations. My research had corporealized in front of me.

AI generated image

While I must maintain confidentiality and cannot disclose any proprietary information owned by my client, I can share that this individual perfectly aligned with the demographics: age, gender and marital status, psychographics: reasons and motivations for immigrating to the United States, and one's placement on the timeline for achieving benchmarks along the journey to citizenship.

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This moment of validation was incredibly rewarding. It reinforced the importance of the work that I had done. It affirmed that I had laid a solid foundation upon which we architected the entire site redesign. I believe this outcome illustrated how vital it is to ground marketing efforts in human-centered research and to empathize with the audience that we aim to serve.

I have worked at companies that didn't see the value of persona work. Many years ago I listened as leadership criticized the client for how strongly they held to the personas that another agency had created, "They talk about them like they are real people" he jested. That's what you are supposed to do with your personas. Personas aren't just "fake people," they are composites of real people with shared wants, needs and struggles.

Understanding the unique perspectives of immigrants not only enhances our content but also fosters a deeper connection with them, ensuring that we address their needs and concerns effectively. Overall, this experience has further motivated me to advocate for persona work.