New in Kentico 8: Personas

What are Personas?
Personas are a well-known term, both, in marketing and in user-centered design (such as creating websites) – it is a representation of a group of users with similar goals, behavior, demographics or intentions. Personas allow you to segment your website visitors, focus on their goals and guide interactions. They are typically based on research done for a specific project, which results in a set of personas (mostly 1-5 personas) consisting of persona image, description and behavioral patterns as well as demographic attributes.  Personas in Kentico give you the ability to transform results of such research into a personalized experience on your website.
 
Let’s see what Personas in Kentico can do.
You can create segments – representations of visitors for each web site.


Each persona is defined by its description:


Also, you can define behavioral characteristics, demographic attributes and mixed rules describing persona:


Once the personas are defined they will immediately start reflecting the visitors of your website. If a visitor meets the criteria of a persona he or she will be awarded points. When a visitor reaches the point threshold of the persona, he or she will be assigned to the specific Persona that he or she has most points in (calculated in %). This means that a visitor can be assigned to one persona only.
 
With personas defined you can leverage it across the system. You can define what content is relevant for each Persona:


Then you can provide personalized content recommendations and preview it:


Another way how to use personas is to send relevant messages to segments of personas:


As you can see, this new module allows for the transfer of personas you might have created for your website into a tool that you will use for segmentation, recommending content or sending relevant messages. As always, any feedback or suggestions on how to improve are welcomed.